HighPressure said..Nowhere is good after a storm...Botany just has a few artificial contributories that lead from industrial plants..No big deal.
Exactly - Salt Pan Creek, and Georges River to the south west (which flows out into the bay on an outgoing tide) and the Cooks River / Alexandria Canal to the north west of the Bay are all given a "warning" to would be fish and shellfish eaters by the DPI:
http://www.dpi.nsw.gov.au/fisheries/info/closures/rec-sw-loc/central-coast-index/botany-bay-and-georges-riverI used to stay at a mates in Padstow behind Salt Pan Creek and used to walk along it daily. The run off from the Selleys Factory into the creek is an unnatural green that sits with a sheen on the surface of the water, which has with a noticeable chemical smell on humid days. Older aged locals living in the area for 50 years (prob dead now - due to age, not the water...) told me the water used to be crystal clear and abundant with fish, when they moved there.
There are also leather tanneries in Mascot/Botany that discharge their waste into the Bay. Plus factories further west of Salt Pan eg in Chipping Norton. You only need to drive out there to see what an industrial fest it is (or google map it)
I'm not saying I don't kite in the Bay, I do. But I'm sure there's health risks associated with the water in the Bay that would be present always, and even greater risks on outgoing tides and in certain wind directions. Sometimes the water tastes weird too - even in Kurnell. But I seem to have gotten used to it....
Maybe think of it as a free sterility/contraceptive treatment... The world's over populated anyway. Who needs to breed? lol
Nah, seriously, I'm interested in any studies that have been done. I know there are good publically available studies re our Beaches (eg that found that Malabar is the worst of the lot due to its direction and shape which catches alot of the run off and stuff that blows back in). Be interesting to see if anything has been done at various points of the Bay....
There's some stuff on the left hand side menu of the 'enviro' website in the link provided a few posts back.
One is this one, which shows levels of Enterococci (which sounds painful: Enter-a-cock-eye LOL), which is basically "a subgroup within the fecal streptococcus group" (according to this website:
water.epa.gov/type/rsl/monitoring/vms511.cfm)
anyway, the link I'm referring to re our levels in the Bay is here:
www.environment.nsw.gov.au/beach/monthlygraphs.htm#southernBut that doesn't address questions about chemical run off from factories and other run off sources....
