Wednesday, September 14, 2016

Meanwhile over on the SEPA water quality results page for Nairn's East Beach - quite an extraordinary bad result on August 8th

Gurnites can browse the SEPA page here. According to the SEPA folk "Single sample results above 500 EC and 200 IE are indicative that water was of low quality when the sample was taken" - well the score on August 8th was a massive 3,600 for EC and the IE was bad too!   Things hadn't been too bad at all this year up to then. Nairn Central beach results also available here

This obviously must have alarmed the testers as they had a think about this and added to the table is the following:

"The elevated result at Nairn (East) is likely to be due to heavy rain and stormy weather conditions preceding sampling. SEPA staff observed that strong westerly winds were pushing the flow from the River Nairn directly over the sampling site at Nairn (East). This combined with the high bacterial counts seen in the River Nairn samples and sediment disturbance at the sampling site are thought to have caused the elevated localised bacterial counts. Joint, pre-planned, SEPA and Scottish Water inspections of the Nairn sewage network on 8 August 2016 confirmed that there were no discharges from the storm overflows at that time. Further investigations by SEPA staff found no other on-going issues or pollution incidents in the area at this time that would have influenced bathing water quality."

No other ongoing issues they say - well the Swan mannie's obeservations could be said to contradict that - more over on the swan blog here. 

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I'm sure the day they were testing the river there were dogs playing in it no more than 200m up stream. I spotted them again at the wee bridge at the rear cemetery gate and this time my dog had been in the burn further up stream less than 100m. I wasn't to know.....