Improvement in bathing quality as all the region's beaches reach the mandatory standard

2:45pm Thursday 7th November 2013 in News By Mark Foster

THE quality of bathing water at beaches throughout the region has continued to improve over the past year, according to the latest test results.

All the bathing beaches in the North-East and Yorkshire met the mandatory requirements set down in the European Bathing Water Directive.

And the vast majority reached the directives higher guideline standard, according to the Environment Agency.

The tests were carried out at each of the beaches on a weekly basis throughout the 2013 bathing season.

Across Yorkshire and the North-East all 54 beaches reached the minimum standard and 46 of those met with the higher standard.

That beat the previous years figures when four beaches failed to reach the minimum level and only 22 met the higher guideline a dip that was attributed to repeated heavy rainfall.

Regional environmental planning manager Trevor Hardy said: We have some fabulous beaches here and these results will give residents and visitors real confidence that water quality is good and getting better.

The Environment Agency has been working hard to reduce discharges, agricultural run-off and cross connections that can have a detrimental effect on water quality, and combined with the fact that this year has been much drier than 2012, we have seen one of the best set of results in twenty years.

See the original post:

Bathing beaches get clean bill of health