There’s a request on the UK Government’s new Your Freedom website asking for a removal of open water swimming bans in the UK.
Although I’m broadly in favour of this, I agree with one of the commenters (RO
) that care must be taken to protect sensitive wildlife.
I also agree that care must be taken to enable swimmers to protect themselves. (This is very different from preventing swimmers from swimming!) Here’s what I mean:
In order for people to be able to make an informed judgement about the safety of swimming in a given body of water, there are two things they must have information about, besides knowledge of their own abilities:
- Physical hazards existing in the body of water;
- The quality of the body of water (i.e. is it biologically or chemically contaminated).
Point 1 should, I think, be handled as follows. If the hazards are obvious (e.g. white water), then nothing needs to be done, since no-one ought to brave those hazards unless they’ve got the skill and training to do so. If the hazards aren’t obvious (e.g. submerged drains, weirs (which are more dangerous than they look because of the back-currents and aeration they produce), or suchlike) then signposts should be placed nearby warning of the hazard(s). Fortunately, this is already done by landowners or local councils in most places.
Point 2 is trickier, but surmountable. It would be very useful if there were a website one could visit that would be updated weekly with reports of the water quality in popular swimming spots. Visitors to the website should be able to add swimming spots to the list of spots to be checked (much as they add ideas on this website), with all spots receiving at least a certain number of requests automatically being added to the list of spots for the checking agency to consider.
The agency/agencies responsible for checking the water quality at the swimming spots ought to ensure that no time-wasting redundant measurements are made (e.g. multiple measurements close together on the same body of water). Once that’s done, it’s just a case of sending off a bloke in a van (or better still, on a bicycle) to collect samples once a week and bring them back to a lab. The lab would then assess the water quality and post the results on the website.
Those who don’t mind swimming in algal blooms, etc, would still be free to do so; the rest of us, if the website reported the presence of that sort of contamination, could make an informed choice to wait for the contamination to clear before returning to that swimming spot!
A side benefit of the system I’ve proposed is that it would motivate people to consider the quality of their environment. After all, if you learn that your local swimming spot is chemically or biologically contaminated, that’s a good incentive to pressure your council to investigate the local farms, industries or sewage works that might be causing the contamination. This would increase the transparency, of local politics and of the water!