Is the River Wye Clean Enough to Swim in?

 The Parish Hall was packed when I got there - they'd laid out chairs for 52 people, and over 100 turned up!  There was also mulled cider being sold at the back at £3 a Green cup, proceeds going to Friends of the Upper Wye, who organised the evening.

The main speaker was Oliver Bullough, and the subject was the possibility of getting the River Wye at the Warren designated for bathing status.  

The various statutory bodies which are supposed to monitor the cleanliness of our rivers are not doing their jobs.  In fact, the funding to enable them to do their jobs has been drastically cut over the past few years, just as the discharge of sewage into waterways by water companies has increased.  I wasn't quick enough to note down all the numbers, but Oliver mentioned sewage discharges at Glasbury and Talgarth, and in Hay sewage was discharged into the Wye for 559 and a half hours over 183 days.  This is a huge amount, and certainly not in "exceptional circumstances" as the law states.

Partly because of this, and partly because of the worries about all the chicken farms in the Wye watershed, there is now a network of around 200 volunteer citizen scientists testing the water all along the Upper Wye, doing the job that the statutory bodies are failing to do.  They are testing for phosphates and nitrates - so for the sort of pollution caused by chicken farms and manure washing into the river because of agricultural practices.  That's because it is cheap and easy to test for these things.  

Applying for designated bathing status wouldn't do anything to change the appearance of the Warren.  Nor, Oliver believes, would it attract more visitors to the Warren, which is already listed in all the Wild Swimming books and websites anyway.  What the designation does mean is that Natural Resources Wales would have to test the quality of the water throughout the bathing season (basically over the summer months), publish the results, and take action to improve the quality of the water if the quality is poor.  

This doesn't only benefit swimmers, but also fishing, canoeists, walkers and wildlife.  Hay depends on tourism, and a clean river can only help in that regard.

Also, by designating Hay as the spot to be tested means that all the river above Hay into Wales will have to be clean too.

The Welsh government are keen to designate bathing spots, and both Jane Dodds, MS, and MP Fay Jones are in favour of keeping the river clean.  Aubrey Fry, who owns the land opposite the Warren, is also in favour, but the Warren Trust itself has members who are doubtful.  They are worried about their legal liability in case of accidents.

(This has come up before with the Warren Trust.  I can't remember which group it was now, but a local group wanted to hold a mass picnic on the Warren, possibly with a few people providing music with guitars, and they were told they had to take out public liability insurance.  All they wanted to do was what members of the public do on the Warren anyway, just all together on a specific afternoon.  The event never took place.)

Oliver said that the bathing designation would make no difference to the legal liability of the landowners.  He also said that the landowners' permission was not needed to apply for the designation.

In the question and answer session, Oliver went into more detail about what Natural Resources Wales would be required to test - they test for two bacteria, one of which is e.coli and I missed the name of the other one.  These bacteria can come into the river from manure or septic tanks.

The legislation on water quality was originally EU law, but since we are no longer in the EU, it was brought into UK law before Brexit happened.  Mostly the legislation has been used to clean up beaches, but Ilkley and a section of the River Thames have also been designated so far.

He was asked why the Friends of the Upper Wye want to take this particular course of action to clean up the river - and it seems to be the only tool that exists to force the statutory bodies to act.  If they don't take action, legal action can be taken against them.

The Friends of the Upper Wye have already been collecting data on the numbers of bathers, paddlers, canoeists, fishermen, dog walkers and others who use the Warren, so all that evidence is ready to be presented to the Welsh government.

Apparently Welsh Water is happy for bathing designations to go ahead, but on lakes and reservoirs rather than rivers, which prompted the comment from a member of the audience that people aren't supposed to swim in reservoirs anyway!

Usually it is local government that applies for the designation, but Oliver has been trying to get hold of someone in Powys County Council for a year now without success.  This seems very familiar to me from the days when I went to the Town Council meetings - it was incredibly hard for them to get Powys County Council to do anything!

A chap from the Campaign for the Protection of Rural Wales was there, and he said that CPRW will back the Friends of the Upper Wye.  They have also been funding some of the citizen science.  He was the one who made the point about the massive funding cuts that have made it impossible for the statutory bodies to do their job properly.

The news story about all the dead fish in the River Llynfi was mentioned.  When the tester finally arrived at the scene, it was too late to test the water - it had all flowed away down the Wye.  He was late to the scene because he had been in North Wales, testing at another incident - and he was the only tester for the whole of Wales!  The fish in the Llynfi were never tested to see if they had been poisoned or whether they had died of oxygen depletion in the water.

Asked why the citizen scientists didn't test for e.coli, it was pointed out that the tests are quite expensive, and volunteers shouldn't be expected to take on that sort of expense.  Also, Natural Resources Wales can choose to ignore tests that are done by other bodies.

At the end of the meeting, a show of hands was asked for to see whether there was enough support for Oliver to continue to try to get bathing designation for the Warren.  Sean O'Donoghue was against, on the grounds that what was needed was a complete change of government, but nearly everyone else was in favour.

The Friends of the Upper Wye are also crowd funding at the moment for a Manager, so that there can be one person co-ordinating their efforts rather than a group of busy people trying to fit it in around their day jobs.