An East Neuk beach recommended in the 2008 good beach guide has failed a bathing water quality sample after traces of raw sewage were detected.
The contaminated sample taken from Earlsferry Beach and recorded by the Scottish Environment Protection Agency (SEPA), was in breach of safety levels for fecal coliforms.
However, the grim discovery has been contained to just a single incident over the summer months, with four subsequent tests passing with “excellent” marks.
The Fife beauty spot was formally identified as a bathing water in 2007 although it has been monitored by SEPA and its predecessors since the early 1980s and achieved consistent levels of excellence over a number of years.
Calum McPhail, SEPA’s environment quality manager for bathing waters, said, “Due to the unpredictable nature of Scotland’s weather it is too early to predict what position we will be in at the end of the season … but it has been a fairly encouraging start for the first half of the summer.”
On SEPA’s website it highlights that of the 13 tests conducted at Elie (Harbour) and Earlsferry since the end of May to the beginning of August, the site failed once and on another occasion passed to mandatory standards.
Photo used under Creative Commons licence courtesy of Flickr user Stewart Lloyd-Jones.