When the faecal tide hits bathing beaches, the results can exceed even your worst
imaginings. In 2007 the local paper at Campbeltown, Argyll, reported that
children on the esplanade were playing in water heavily contaminated with
sewage and that two of them had slipped and become totally immersed in
diluted excrement. Streets in the town have regularly been flooded with
sewage. On August 1 last year, Sunderland City Council reported a deluge at
its Whitburn South beach that left the promenade and tide line awash with
“sewerage debris and dirty run-off water” in quantities “too much to
estimate”. Staithes, in North Yorkshire, also a designated bathing beach
popular with families but plagued with incontinent CSOs, has the worst
record in the UK, failing the minimum legal water-quality standard (a
statutory offence) 11 times in 13 years. Other towns in trouble include
Combe Martin, Fowey, Looe, Llanelli, Aberdeen and Helensburgh.
The unsettling thing is that there is no comprehensive official record of
which CSOs are misbehaving. Under their licences, water companies — which
are responsible for sewerage as well as fresh water supply — are allowed to
discharge onto designated bathing beaches no more than three times each
“bathing season” (in England, May 15 to September 30). How often are the
conditions breached? The answer is anyone’s guess. In 2006 the European
Commission instigated four test cases against the UK, complaining that
outflows at Torbay, London, Kilbarchan in Renfrew-shire and Sunderland’s
notorious Whitburn South were discharging constantly. You would have to be a
supreme optimist — indeed, blind, noseless and deaf to the evidence — to
believe that, in a national network of 22,000 CSOs affecting more than 520
beaches, these four were the sole offenders. Neither is there much comfort
in the fact that the three-times-a-year limit applies only to designated
bathing beaches and that most of our coast has scant protection from the
law.
This is why The Sunday Times and MCS jointly are inviting readers to take part
in a monitoring programme designed to identify the most persistent trouble
spots (see panel, page 19). Like the litter survey of 30 years ago, it
should put the issue beyond all further doubt.
The Environment Agency (EA) argues correctly that water at British beaches is
cleaner than it was 10 years ago. Bathing water is tested against two
benchmarks laid down by the EU — a “mandatory” standard and a higher
“guideline” standard, defined by the number of sewage-borne bacteria such as
Escherichia coli. In 2008, 97% of the 495 designated bathing waters in
England and Wales met the mandatory, and 72% the guideline standard, an
increase of a third since 1998. But passing the test does not mean the water
is clean, only that concentrations of faecal matter are low in comparison
with others.
It has been argued — for example by the World Health Organization in 1998 —
that illnesses can be caused at bacterial concentrations far lower than the
mandatory limit. What it boils down to in crude terms is that swimmers at
almost half of Britain’s 776 coastal bathing beaches — the 333 that failed
the guideline test last year — have on average a one-in-seven chance of
catching a sewage-related disease. There are also serious doubts about the
efficacy of the EA’s water sampling system. Incredibly, on the very day last
summer that Sunderland City Council found South Whitburn covered in sewage,
the EA logged the water quality as “excellent”.
The fact is that the only safe amount of sewage to swim in is none at all.
Another fact is that since the best-ever year of 2006, the graph has taken a
downward turn. Water quality is no longer improving. It is getting worse.
Last year 78 bathing beaches failed to reach even the minimum mandatory
standard — the highest total of the century so far.
Ominously, the EA and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs
put this down to overactive CSOs and increased “diffuse pollution” — ie,
dirty storm water from streets and fields. It is ominous because both these
malfunctions are exacerbated by heavy rainfall, and heavier rainfall is a
feature of climate change, which is progressive. Already, many of the
outflows are spilling even in dry weather. All it takes is an influx of
holidaymakers putting pressure on the lavatories. This is a blatant
contravention of EC policy, which is that CSOs are to be used only for
emergency flood relief after “unusually heavy rainfall”, not as regular
conduits for sewage. This is why the four test cases have been brought, and
why the UK government may find itself in court.
The EA declared in 2005 that over a third of the estuaries and a fifth of
coastal waters around England and Wales were threatened by diffuse pollution
and CSOs. As a result, 10 English, one Scottish and two Welsh estuaries are
already “eutrophic”, meaning the water has become so over-enriched by animal
and human sewage, fertilisers and other pollutants that marine life is being
smothered by algal blooms and starved of oxygen. The UK is not alone. In
2007 the UN Global Environment report warned that this was an urgent
worldwide problem. Again, this is not just a matter of distaste or of
environmental doomsters denying libertarians their god-given right to swim
in sewage. Over half the world depends on food from the sea, much of it
taken from exactly the kinds of inshore waters most vulnerable to pollution.
We should not just be ashamed of what we have done to the sea; we should be
afraid. Over the millennia since we first set sail upon it, we have falsely
assumed it to be infinite — infinite in its ability to supply what we want
from it, infinite in its capacity to absorb the leavings of our terrestrial
lives. We have warmed and acidified it, killed the breeding stock,
overturned the ecology, and turned parts of it into a salty emulsion of
plastic slicked with oil. We didn’t mean to do these things — with rare,
misplaced modesty, we doubted our power as mere flesh and bone to influence
such an elemental force. Algae and jellyfish apart, nothing gains from a
debased environment. The struggle for survival of birds, fish and animals
around our coasts is now a permanent tableau of distress that, in earlier
times, might have been recorded as a biblical plague.
Every year, numbers of seabirds are lower than the last. Puffins are a typical
example. They feed on sand eels whose numbers around Britain have been
doubly hit — by overfishing, and by warming waters that inhibit the plankton
on which sand eels feed. Guillemots, kittiwakes and terns, too, all struggle
to survive. Whole colonies, hundreds of thousands strong, either fail to
return to their nesting sites or return and fail to breed. There is nothing
parochial about this. Scotland hosts 45% of the EU’s nesting seabirds, so
the impact is felt internationally. Kittiwakes on RSPB reserves on Orkney
last year declined between 50% and 89%. Arctic skuas were down by 30%.
You may not be able to tell a kittiwake from a kestrel, but this does not mean
you should be deaf to what the birds are saying. When we look at the ocean
we see only the reflection of the sky. Birds see, and suffer, all that is
happening beneath. It’s a message we should heed while we still can. New
stricter standards for European bathing waters come into force in 2015. If
the UK is going to meet them, it will need to get itself toilet-trained at
record speed
