Warwick and I went for the early morning paddle this morning, both commented on how "thick" the water was around our stretch of Bay. Due to the heavy rains last week, the Water Authorities allowed huge volumes of untreated sewerage to flow into the Bay. I guess they did alert the public this time through the media, last time, a couple of months back, they allowed people to swim in the bay plus all other aquatic activities for a couple of weeks before " alerting" the public of the potential health risks. Just some friendly advice.... don't fall in.
Its making me glad that I am making the change from being a swimmer to a supnut. Bay swims are never fun in the murky brown soup. Incidently, I think if Port Phillip wants to be a bay then thats cool, Perhaps we can start the "Bay rights" movement
It was strange watching the brown water and the calm water move down the bay, When it got to Half moon bay there seemed to be a lot of water moving even at high tide.
At the RPS even, a few of us were hanging out on the balcony of the SLSC and watched the brown sludge drift across in a matter of minutes, a frothy line of YUCK moving quietly across, eclipsing the crystal clear water we had all just enjoyed.
That's a whole lot of bad right there. Thank goodness it wasn't a half hour early when many of us were jumping off our boards to cool off after the race.
Perhaps this latest downpour will flush the toilet?
Yes your right there needs to be a warning system in place to enable the general public to know about the potential health risks that such disgusting pitfalls produce. I ' happened' to hear about it on the radio but there was no indication of what to expect such as we saw at Half Moon Bay Unfortunately we are all dispensible when it comes to Goverments and Corporations policies and rhetoric, Maybe Sup Vic can become a political lobby group?
Or Melbourne water or whoever runs that poo factory can do what there paid for and build adequate infastructure to deal with it....One olympic sized pool of Kidney type material would be enough to recyle all the waste water in Australia in to drinking water....pull your finger out government wankers
There is a warning system, sort of. The EPA web site does testing and posts the results.
http://www.epa.vic.gov.au/beachreport/default.asp
Unfortunately they stop testing at the end of March, and they only test a few times a week. They only do retests if the readings are abnormally high. They don't do tests straight after heavy rain.
The brown stain is just normal storm water runoff. It is not necessarily poo. The colour of the water clears within 4-5 days after rain. The poo takes longer to go away so you can be swimming in crystal clear water that is heavily polluted.
Even if they don't release sewage into the bay the water after rain is heavily polluted. You get dog poo, oil and stuff off the roads, overflow from the sewerage connections from some of the older suburbs etc etc.
BAY RIGHTS.....lol lol lol. Yeah i sailed up the yarra to waterfront city yesterday and had to dodge all sorts of logs and turds and junk. Its really disgusting at the moment. We came up from queenscliff and you could see brown streaks like rivers of Sheet! a lot of the way. Stink. Stink. Stink.... Oh well because its not a "Bay" it might hang around for a while.