Ya man. Food crisis still in effect. Went there sunday before last and de place ram and de food scarce. So after we jus go Portmore look some food. But is a nice beach to come with kids and jus a easy still. Next time if mi waan food mi ago Hellshire fi eat then move Fort Clarance fi swim.
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<span style="font-weight: bold">... Environmental scientist warns that Jamaicans could be putting themselves at risk by swimming off sections of the St Catherine coastline</span>
Christopher Serju, Gleaner Writer
PERSONS WHO swim at the Hellshire public beach in St Catherine and other sections of the coastline are putting themselves at risk because of the poor water quality.
There are renewed fears that partially treated sewage is getting into the coastal water, increasing the faecal coliform and other harmful bacteria in the area where hundreds of Jamaicans go swimming every week.
The bacteria can cause skin and eye infections, gastrointestinal disorders, respiratory illness, and death.
<span style="font-weight: bold">"I would eat fish there (Hellshire Beach), but I would not swim in the water at certain places, especially after it has been raining," </span>coastal and environ-mental scientist Professor Dale Webber told The Sunday Gleaner recently.
Webber, who is also president of Tornadoes - the largest local swim club - says there is reason to believe that inadequately treated sewage is adversely affecting the water quality around Hellshire.
Water contaminated
He recalls an occasion when the Amateur Swimming Association of Jamaica was planning an open-water swim meet at Hellshire and he was part of a team which conducted random water sampling of the area.
"I came back and told them, 'You shouldn't be doing it there and if you doing it, my daughters not swimming there' because the faecal coliform count in the water was way too high," Webber said.
He noted that the World Health Organisation regulations say for contact with human skin, the water should have a faecal coliform count of no more than 100 MPN (most probable number) per hundred millilitres.
"We were finding in some places where they were thinking of doing the open swim from Half Moon to Hellshire values ranging between 240, and up to as high as 1,000," added Webber.
"Now, you might say that is not so bad because in Kingston Harbour, where we knew we had sewage outfall, we would get values like 24,000. So we know what raw sewage looks like, so this is not raw sewage.
"This is sewage that's been diluted. It may have been treated. We don't know what's happening in the source water, but where we were sampling is about 30-40 metres offshore," Webber said.
"Looking at the times we've sampled, the values are unaccept-ably high, especially after it rains. We've had samples from the same Hellshire area which have been within the range.
"I have seen that these correlate when it's dry. It appears that when it rains, a normally operating sewage treatment system gets flushed, and water that should remain in a ponding system for 21 days now gets pushed out after 10, or five, or three, so it doesn't get enough time for treatment," said Webber.
A more up-to-date and accurate measure should be ready shortly when James Moss-Solomon, prof-essor of environmental manage-ment and director of the Centre for Marine Sciences at the University of the West Indies, and his team conduct a sampling of the water quality in the Kingston Harbour and selected sections of the Hellshire coast.
Several pollutants
This will be the first major study since the National Water Commission introduced the Soapberry sewage treatment facility to reduce the flow of raw sewage into the Kingston Harbour.
The last study was conducted in the 1990s and determined that 60 per cent of the pollution along the Hellshire shoreline was attributable to Kingston Harbour.
The quality of coastal and marine waters is affected by discharge of sewage, urban runoff, and agricultural and industrial effluent.
The research work to be done by Moss-Solomon, Webber, and their team will provide answers as to whether sewage-treatment plants in the area could be contributing to pollution of the beach water and other areas of the Hellshire coastline.
"We will need at least six months, better yet, a year, of data to be able to compare the present conditions with what we had in the '80s and '90s," Webber told The Sunday Gleaner.
<span style="font-weight: bold">But while that study is being done, more and more Jamaicans could be putting their lives at risk swimming off the St Catherine coast.</span>
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