Section of the Gunboat Beach in Kingston
Erica James-King, Staff Reporter
WESTERN BUREAU:
THE WATER quality of three beaches on the rim of Kingston Harbour - the Gunboat, Buccaneer and Harbour Head beaches - remain unsuitable for bathing despite years of consultations on addressing the problem.
In fact, environmental experts note that the distribution of faecal coliform bacteria in sections of the Kingston Harbour exceeds the standards accepted by the World Health Organisation for contact with human skin for recreation.
"Some of the things which could happen if you bathe at the beaches on the harbour, especially in terms of the bacteria which proliferate from sewage are ear infections and skin irritations/infections," Peter Edwards, scientific officer with the Centre for Marine Sciences at the University of the West Indies, told The Sunday Gleaner.
"Gastro-enteritis and diarrhoea could also result if water is somehow ingested or seafood caught at those beaches is consumed. Some of the heavy metal waste in the harbour can get into the system of those creatures and trigger shellfish poisoning, if they are consumed," Mr. Edwards said.
He said huge amounts of plastics and polystyrene are in the water, and Gunboat Beach had a shark fence which was clogged with garbage.
One of the major studies on the Kingston Harbour done by Dr. Dale Webber of the Department of Life Sciences of the UWI, and made public in 1999, indicated that 50 per cent of the total suspended solids to the harbour was attributable to sewage, while industries accounted for 23 per cent. The study also pinpointed the Greenwich sewage outfall as the major source of significant phosphorous to the harbour.
CLOSED TO THE PUBLIC
Gunboat Beach, which ranked as a premier recreational facility in Kingston during the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s and the former finishing leg for the annual Cross the Harbour Swim has been closed to the public for the last 19 years.
To some residents of Harbour View, the history of Gunboat is the tale of a beach that was allowed to die, while Government and citizens associations stood idly by. "I used to love to swim at Gunboat Beach, but for the last few years I have had to go outside of Kingston rather a costly venture, when my family want an enjoyable day at the beach," said Conroy Grey, a resident of Harbour View.
He charged that successive governments have been long on talk and studies of the harbour, but short on action in cleaning up that water way and saving the beaches along the world's seventh largest harbour. He points to the malfunctioning sewage plants at Harbour View and Greenwich Farm, as a major part of what is wrong with Kingston Harbour.
Both the Centre for Marine Sciences and the environmental monitoring arm of the public sector, the National Environment and Planning Agency (NEPA), agree.
Cowell Lyn, project manager of the Kingston Harbour Rehabilitation project acknowledged, "Everything else pales into relative significance when compared to the organic pollution that comes from the sewage... the two big pipes, one at Greenwich Farm and one at Tivoli gully are putting out poorly treated sewage into the harbour each day."
But up to last week, The Sunday Gleaner observed members of the public still defying prohibition warnings as they bathed at Gunboat Beach.
In the meantime, the US$620,000 Kingston Harbour Rehabilitation project which is dubbed 'Institutional Strength-ening to support Environmental Management of Kingston Harbour' has not gone beyond its preparatory stages.
"We are now in the process of defining the scope of the work, procuring material and formulating the contracts for implementers of the project," Mr. Lyn told The Sunday Gleaner, while explaining that the project will run for 24 months.
The first component of the four-part project is to provide consulting services for improving the institutional capacity of the Government to address the contamination of Kingston Harbour. This first component which has not yet got off the ground, has, as its focus, the development of a water quality model for tracking pollutants to the Kingston Harbour.
