Minnis Bay, St. Mildred’s Bay, West Bay in Westgate, Margate Main Sands, Stone Bay, Viking Bay and Ramsgate Main Sands, have all lost their blue flag status.
Botany Bay, Joss Bay and Westbrook Bay are the only Thanet beaches to receive Blue Flag awards.
What we have here is a government funded and large company funded award system that fails to cough up the basic criteria of stopping you swimming around in sewage, blue flag or no blue flag.
The problem here can best be summed up as, if you want a blue flag you need a brown flag too and some good communications so that the council know when to fly it.
My understanding is that if on these occasions the council put up signs notifying the public that the sea was contaminated then we would be able to retain our blue flag status on the effected beaches.
Botany Bay, Joss Bay and Westbrook Bay are the only Thanet beaches to receive Blue Flag awards.
What we have here is a government funded and large company funded award system that fails to cough up the basic criteria of stopping you swimming around in sewage, blue flag or no blue flag.
Right engineering hat as promised.
The problem here is one of old drains mixed system drains that are too expensive to replace that cause problems when we get a heavy rainstorm.
These mixed system drains have sewage and rainwater runoff in them and most of the time everything in them goes off to the sewage plant and is properly processed so that the water that is discharged into the sea is safe and clean.
On occasions we have a large rainstorm or a pump failure, sometimes a combination of the two, meaning there is nowhere for all the waste water and sewage to go, in these instances an emergency discharge is made via one of the several outfall pipes into the sea.
These discharges are properly monitored and the water company has the information relating to the few occasions when the sea is contaminated.
What happens instead is that nothing happens, by this I mean that after Southern Water make an emergency discharge of sewage near to one of our bathing beaches, this doesn’t result in the council taking down the blue flag and putting up warning signs telling people the sea is contaminated.
I tried last year to get the council to set up a system to overcome this problem, the result appears to have been inaction causing most of our beaches to be stripped of their blue flag status.
See
I will add to this one
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