Most bathing sites failed EU standards last year

A report issued yesterday in Brussels shows that the majority of Malta's bathing sites last summer did not reach cleanliness standards as envisaged by the European Union. The only country with worse results was Poland.

On the other hand, Greece, Cyprus, the Netherlands and Lithuania achieved top marks for their bathing water quality.

The Commission said that although the Maltese results are generally lower than the EU average, the expectation is that they will improve appreciably in the bathing seasons ahead.

This was the first time since EU accession that Malta has been included in the annual EU-wide monitoring report on bathing water quality. In 2004 it failed to supply data to the Commission.

The report said of Malta: "The rates of compliance with the (EU) mandatory and guide values amount to 40.2 per cent and 33.3 per cent respectively.

"Almost 60 per cent of the bathing areas were not sampled or not compliant with the mandatory values. Bathing was prohibited in a number of bathing areas. This implies that two out of three bathing areas are failing to comply with the minimum standards set in the EU Directive."

Member states are obliged to monitor the water quality of their bathing areas during the bathing season. Last year Malta started to monitor a total of 87 bathing areas for microbiological parameters - "total coliforms" and "faecal coliforms" - and the physico-chemical parameters "mineral oils", "surface-active substances" and "phenols".

The report said it must be remembered "that the member states which have been monitoring their bathing water quality for years did not achieve the good results reported now until several years after they introduced the inspections required by the national legislation implementing Directive 76/160/EEC and the subsequent amendments thereto." While 96 per cent of coastal bathing sites in the EU met the mandatory standards of the bathing water directive last year, the proportion of inland waters in compliance continued to fall, decreasing by almost four percentage points to 86 per cent. This was mainly due to insufficient sampling of water quality, which counts as non-compliance.

Presenting the results, Environment Commissioner Stravos Dimas said they were very encouraging, with clean water for bathers at well over 95 per cent of Europe's coastal waters.