It was around 4:00 p.m. yesterday, Friday, when the Guardamar del Segura City Council made it official that the Tossal and Centro beaches of the Alicante town were open and in use. Until that time, and since the previous day, the red flag indicated the prohibition of bathing decreed by the authorities after an analysis of the water carried out on Wednesday that detected double the maximum admissible values of the fecal contamination indicator parameters.
On the same day, the Arenal de Xàbia beach received the same news for the third time so far this summer: it already had to prohibit bathing last week and earlier in the month of June. And in the Alicante capital, a ban on bathing was decreed on the popular Saladar beach, better known as Urbanova -name of the urbanization built in front of it-, and an extensive area of the coast that also includes the only beach for dogs in the municipality and the popular but unclassifiable beach of San Gabriel. Unlike in Guardamar, by late afternoon in neither of these two cases had the ban been lifted.
It is striking the proliferation of cases that this summer occurs on the Alicante coast (last Friday it happened on Elche's Carabassí beach), whose waters are classified as excellent in more than 95% of the cases by the same organism dependent on the General Directorate of Water that performs the analyses.
It is the Hydraulic Resources and Water Quality Planning Service of the General Directorate of Water of the Generalitat Valenciana that manages and coordinates, during the bathing season, the control and continuous monitoring of the quality of maritime and inland bathing waters of the community.
Among its functions is the control of the propensity for the proliferation of macroalgae or marine phytoplankton, as well as the proliferation of cyanobacteria (algal blooms, coenobiums or foam), evaluating their risk to health.
This body determines the special situations in which it is considered necessary to temporarily prohibit bathing or recommend abstaining from it in a certain area, to preserve the health of the population. And, in these cases, carry out the necessary management measures, in the event of detection of some type of contamination in bathing water, to identify the causes of this contamination and establish the necessary corrective actions to eliminate it.
From the second week of June to the first week of September in maritime bathing areas, and in July and August in continental bathing areas, the Weekly Information on Bathing Water Quality is carried out.
During this period, weekly reports are sent by email (on Thursdays or Fridays) to the town halls with the results of the sampling and inspections carried out each week in the bathing areas. In the visual inspections, data on the appearance of the water, state of maintenance of the sand and peri-beach zone, services for users are collected, and it is verified if the information on the quality of the beach water is exposed. When problems are identified on a beach, reports are made with graphic information on these inspections that are sent by email to the different town halls.
During the bathing season, bathing water control is carried out by determining the microbiological parameters indicating contamination from residual Escherichia coli and intestinal Enterococci.
When unacceptable levels of contamination are detected, the beach is qualified, in a timely manner, as "not suitable for bathing", and from the Hydraulic Resources and Water Quality Planning Service, an episode of "contamination of short duration", and the following protocol is followed:
Communication is sent by email to the technical services of the corresponding town hall so that they proceed to close the beach for bathing, and communicate it to the public user at the accesses to the beach, health posts, information panels, and any other warning system. cash for users.
New samplings of the beach are carried out until results are again obtained below the maximum admissible levels to consider the water as suitable for bathing; Negotiations are carried out with the different departments involved and the corresponding City Council, and inspections, which allow the causes of the contamination to be identified and its elimination managed.
Once the results are obtained in the resamplings carried out that are below the maximum admissible values, in the two parameters analyzed, the closure of the episode of "short-term contamination" is communicated to the council, so that it can carry out the communication to the public , indicating that it proceeds to open the bathroom on the beach.
In the 2022 bathing season, which is the one that has allowed us to obtain the bathing water qualification in force this year, 229 maritime bathing areas were controlled throughout the Valencian coast, with 260 sampling points, and 14 continental bathing areas. , with 14 sampling points.
A total of 4,800 analyzes were carried out: 4,000 analyzes of bathing waters, 430 analyzes of environmental control points in bathing waters and 370 analyzes of effluents that discharge into the sea and that could have an influence on the quality of the beaches.
At the end of the 2022 bathing season, the classification of bathing waters was carried out based on the data series formed by those of the 2022 season and the three previous seasons (2019, 2020 and 2021). In 219 cases, 95.63% of the total, the water quality was considered excellent; in six, 2.62% of the total, good; and in four, sufficient (1.75%) and there was no insufficient qualification.
