Iain Maxwell
With another Hawke's Bay summer and holiday period upon us, many of you will be heading to your favourite swimming spot to cool off.
We want you to enjoy the superb beaches and rivers on offer in the region and we also want you to know about where you are swimming so you know if it is 'good to go' or not.
There has been a lot of coverage recently about New Zealand's rivers being unswimmable. Fair to say in some isolated instances this is the case.
There are a few rivers that are generally not safe to swim in at any time of the year.
But this is not the norm, in fact, by in large the vast majority of New Zealand's and Hawke's Bay's rivers and beaches are safe to swim at the times people want to swim in them.
While it is important that we have honest conversations about the state of our region's waterways, it is equally important that we don't generalise or try to over simplify very complex water quality challenges. The danger being that we can miss the right solution in the process.
There is another risk in that we are seeing a decline in the use of our waterways as the public are led to believe they are unsafe to use all of the time and with this reducing use there is a loss of affinity to them.
Our point of difference is our strong social and cultural connection to freshwater and beaches. We don't want to lose this and with it the desire to take action where required to fix things.
To help you make an informed decision about where you choose to swim, Hawke's Bay Regional Council's science team monitors more than 30 popular recreational areas weekly throughout summer (from November to mid-March). The sites were selected by surveying the public about their favourite swimming spots, and measuring them against the national guidelines.
At the end of the season we calculate the "suitability for recreation grade" for each of the swim spots we monitor. It combines the weekly sampling over the previous five years, with a catchment risk assessment to produce a grade between "very good" and "very poor".
The water quality at Hawke's Bay beaches is excellent most of the time, with many of our southern and northern coastal beaches 'very good'. Our rivers and streams can be more affected by animal waste washed into them after rainfall, even with good riparian protection or in unmodified catchments and so typically rate as 'fair' as a result.
Lagoons and coastal streams can have poorer water quality as they are at the end of the catchment. They can also attract a lot birds, which can push up faecal levels.
Rule of Toes
If it has been raining heavily our best advice is to stay out of the water for three days. This is because the rain will have washed faecal material off the surrounding land and into waterways. A handy guide is if you cannot see your toes when standing knee-deep in water, then water quality is not the best for a swim.
What's LAWA all about?
The results of our summer monitoring are available at www.hbrc.govt.nz in our new "Swim through Summer" feature. We share this monitoring information with the national Land, Air, Water Aotearoa (LAWA) website's (www.lawa.org.nz) new "Can I swim here?" feature.
Initially a collaboration between New Zealand's 16 regional councils and unitary authorities, LAWA is now a partnership between the councils, Cawthron Institute, Ministry for the Environment and Massey University and has been supported by the Tindall Foundation.
It is New Zealand's most comprehensive source of water quality, water quantity and air quality data. It provides the current state and trend information for New Zealand's rivers and lakes, water use and availability, bathing beaches and air quality.
By sharing this information on the LAWA website it means if you're travelling outside of Hawke's Bay and want to know what the water quality is like at your holiday swimming spot, the information is available to you in one place.
Iain Maxwell is the Hawke's Bay Regional Council Group Manager Resource Management. Views expressed here are the writer's opinion and not the newspaper's. Email: editor@hbtoday.co.nz