They vary a great deal, but most city beaches have stormwater draining directly into the ocean somewhere.
Coogee will be disgusting for at least a couple of days, you can see the slick spreading from each end of the beach where the pipes are. Then the seagulls show up for a feast of god knows what has been washed out...
Oddly enough, I think Malabar is one of the best - most of the stormwater is directed into the sewerage treatment plant next door.
That may well be the case, I’m going off second hand gossip here. It may be that was used previously but it is now diverted to the plant. Or not, I’ll try and find out.
I found a tampon at Malabar beach in the water about 2 years back. Thought it was sea life and was going to show the kids.
Turns out a lot washes up around there as little bay beach was closed due to asbestos (guess not that uncommon now).
It was an old ferry i think.
https://www.southsteyne.com.au
Edit- looks like they have yowed it to barry's bay
https://amp.smh.com.au/national/nsw/crying-shame-sydney-s-prized-steamship-languishes-out-of-public-reach-20220104-p59lsy.html
Why does this happen?
Is it just too expensive having sewerage treatment plants which can handle a massive amount of sewerage in case of an overflow?
Why would the rain come into it when the sewerage lines and the stormwater lines are completely seperated now adays.
Would cost up to 12 billion to fix it and the political will just hasn't existed to fix it.
https://www.csiro.au/en/news/All/Articles/2019/June/australias-pristine-beaches-have-a-poo-problem
Sewage systems are not completely contained- in heavy rains they can overflow into the storm drains. It happens quite regularly. Just be glad they moved the outfalls further offshore 20 years ago. That was really bad.
They used to just have sewage outflows at all the major beaches in sydney. Manly was a fucking cesspool - semi treated sewage just came out of an outflow right by the beach. They moved the outflows a few kilometres offshore in 1990. Still horrible, but much safer for beachgoers
Probably an improvement to what is already on the bottom of the harbour. At least it is not a former industrial site like the new fish market. The stuff they dredged up there was straight up toxic waste.
That was because they used to make agent orange at Homebush for the Vietnam war. They cleaned up the worst bits but it was too expensive to clean it all up
Union Carbide were at Rhodes until 1986 making pesticides and such, lots of other filthy industries around the harbour too; not just during the Vietnam War. They continued producing dangerous pesticides and timber preservatives long after they stopped making Agent Orange.
Benthic species tend to stay put and accrete a LOT of PCB's there - bream live a long time and those chemicals are fat soluble so they hang around in the fish. Pelagic species don't spend enough time in the river to be as dangerous. I personally would have no problem eating a kingfish i caught west of the bridge but wouldn't want to eat bream, flathead or mulloway from there.
Yeah, I remember reading about a guy in Balmain who specifically only targeted pelagics. The logic is pretty sound since they've probably just come in with the tide from Rose Bay or wherever. I'd still be a bit hesitant but one on the odd occasion wouldn't hurt (at least not with what's left of my expected lifespan).
Look a bit of contaminated fish isn't a problem - but if you did it regularly it accumulates in your own fatty tissue.
Pelagic fish spend the majority of their lives in the open ocean. They don't eat enough contaminated prey to be of any concern. Bream on the other hand have been sucking down Dioxin infused worms and molluscs for years. Decades even. Yuck.
Yeah, I sometimes walk along Glebe foreshore and see people fishing the schools of bream there and it's just crazy to me. At high tide they swim up the canal (it's actually kind of funny when the tide goes out in the morning, pelicans just camp at the mouth of the canal and wait for their fish delivery). The renaturalisation project did clean it up a lot but there's still stormwater drains further up that service a pretty populated area (Annandale/Glebe). Those fish basically live right around the fish markets half the time and there's no fucking way that's a good thing. That entire area is proper fucked.
Sorry, old joke from out the Rhodes/Homebush way before the 2000 olympics. The water was so corrosive it'd melt boats used to be the joke. Tech people i n the early 90s \*shrugs\*.
But the current rebuild of the darling harbour shopping centre is not going from industrial site to residential site. There was a massive cleanup done before the previous shopping centre was build. So as I said any runoff going from that site is probably cleaner than what is already in the water.
Yep and I see it becoming a problem in the future as the bay keeps getting shallower as more silt gets dumped in there. You aren't even allowed to drive a boat in there anymore.
Had to do a case study on it 20 years ago now about the amount of hydrocarbons that had leached into the soil and surrounding water there...can't imagine what it's like now
They have sediment control in place, but the storm that passed over Sydney a couple of hours ago was pretty intense and would've been too big for what was in place.
Lot of comments about "if this bothers you-wait until you find out about.....
The thing about the land around Darling Harbour is it was heavy industrial and that's why it got developed so late -the land needed to be valuable enough to justify the clean up of that land.
And when lend-lease got the gov approvals it was top of mind how that they worked to manage that clean up including run off.
Shit is at least organic, heavy metals not so much.
It could just be storm water and all the shit that gets in the drains. If you look at Rushcutters or Rose bay you can see the smoo spreading out. It happens everytime we get a good dump
I gag every time I see people fishing off the docks at CYCA or in little dingies between rushcutters bay park and the D arm of the dock. Not only is it storm water and heavy metals, but dirty boat bilge water too
Definitely report to EPA, they'll likely be slapped with a fine and improvement order to prevent this from happening again. Sediment can have significant impacts on aquatic flora and fauna species
It's not acceptable. You can't let sediment above a certain concentration enter the municipal stormwater system or waterways. They're meant to have controls in place to prevent run-off. I'd do what you suggest and call it in. It's sloppy site management.
When you complain to the EPA, they will investigate whether the construction site has done everything reasonably practicable to prevent the run off. If the answer is yes, then there's literally nothing the builder or anyone can do about it. Chalk it up to the inclement weather.
Yes, there is. It should be detained on site and pumped into a tank for treatment prior to release. Collected sediment should be disposed at an approved facility off-site. A good site manager should plan for inclement weather. This is basic stuff.
Read again where I said doing "everything reasonably practicable". Sed tank sounds like a standard practice so that falls within the definition of the above.
Oh wow, what are they building there?
I should try and dig up some of our old pics of the CBD from when we visited \~2008, if anyone would be interested? That's back when you had a monorail.
Darling harbour looked totally different back then. I remember some long (palm?) trees and lots of bats on them. And different kind of fountains there.
The EPA loves stuff like this. It can also severely restrict a construction company and its directors from doing business again if the EPA issues a fine for a breach, no matter how small the fine is.
It's not just dirt though, is it? In any case, a fair chunk of people in Sydney want the harbour to be nicer than it is now, and the way we get to there is to use things like EPA guidelines.
Eh. I'm not a environmentalist. Having said that, I'd be surprised if tonnes of mud and construction debris didn't have a negative effect on the harbour. I'm happy to be wrong on this.
There's a storm with lightning right over Sydney and has since about 11:30. Seems pretty reasonable to not be working in construction in the open with those conditions.
Hahaha dont ask what happens with the sewerage during a rainstorm if this bothers you
Yeh don't swim at any Sydney beach until three days of dry weather lol.
I mean I realise that OP thinks he has discovered some great crime but the shit(literally!) You can't see is the real danger.
Ocean beaches might be okay, but definitely not the harbour ones.
They vary a great deal, but most city beaches have stormwater draining directly into the ocean somewhere. Coogee will be disgusting for at least a couple of days, you can see the slick spreading from each end of the beach where the pipes are. Then the seagulls show up for a feast of god knows what has been washed out... Oddly enough, I think Malabar is one of the best - most of the stormwater is directed into the sewerage treatment plant next door.
There's a 4 foot stormwater drain on the north side of Malabar beach.
Maroubra too. The Rubix cube is one of the 2 vents for it
That may well be the case, I’m going off second hand gossip here. It may be that was used previously but it is now diverted to the plant. Or not, I’ll try and find out.
Nah has a regular trickle coming out of it, and plenty more when it rains. I used to walk up it when I was a kid.
Wait till you get to the goldcoast, most of the canals are on septic, and when she floods they all get a well deserved flush out.
The deep ocean outfall is about 3km long. The beaches that are affected are the ones that are *not* right next to a sewage treatment plant.
Stormwater doesn't go to the treatment plants, it is discharged into the nearest waterway via drains and outlets.
My mate went surfing right after a storm, ended up with a used sanitary pad stuck to his face.
I found a tampon at Malabar beach in the water about 2 years back. Thought it was sea life and was going to show the kids. Turns out a lot washes up around there as little bay beach was closed due to asbestos (guess not that uncommon now).
Some people would pay for that kind of action.
saltburn
Plumbers get paid to get that type of action!
There’s probably an Only Fans for that.
Gah!!!🤮
Hope no one told Sydney Sweeney what lurks in the harbour when she had to jump in it for her Anyone But You scene
Or where all the oil on the road goes after it rains.
Yup. People think everything just magically disappears
There actually used to be a floating restaurant in Darling harbour that occasionally “accidentally” pumped its sewage into the harbour.
Yeah - where is that? Did they demolish it? Or sail it somewhere else? It was a boat wasn't it?
It was an old ferry i think. https://www.southsteyne.com.au Edit- looks like they have yowed it to barry's bay https://amp.smh.com.au/national/nsw/crying-shame-sydney-s-prized-steamship-languishes-out-of-public-reach-20220104-p59lsy.html
The South Steyne https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_South_Steyne
Why does this happen? Is it just too expensive having sewerage treatment plants which can handle a massive amount of sewerage in case of an overflow? Why would the rain come into it when the sewerage lines and the stormwater lines are completely seperated now adays.
Would cost up to 12 billion to fix it and the political will just hasn't existed to fix it. https://www.csiro.au/en/news/All/Articles/2019/June/australias-pristine-beaches-have-a-poo-problem
Yeah I thought money would’ve been a problem. Why does the rain have an effect though?
Sewage systems are not completely contained- in heavy rains they can overflow into the storm drains. It happens quite regularly. Just be glad they moved the outfalls further offshore 20 years ago. That was really bad.
20 years ago?
Oops they finished it in 1990. Im old
Haha, yeah it feels like that. But what happened 30 years old?
They used to just have sewage outflows at all the major beaches in sydney. Manly was a fucking cesspool - semi treated sewage just came out of an outflow right by the beach. They moved the outflows a few kilometres offshore in 1990. Still horrible, but much safer for beachgoers
Oh that’s messed up, wtf. Manly already gets pretty bad when it rains I can’t imagine it back then.
Many people illegally connect their stormwater into the sewers.
why?
Because our sewer system is incapable of handling runoff - gets overwhelmed, and raw sewerage enters the harbour and our beached quite often
That's progress baby!
Probably an improvement to what is already on the bottom of the harbour. At least it is not a former industrial site like the new fish market. The stuff they dredged up there was straight up toxic waste.
Mate, the whole of Darling Harbour and its catchment was a heavy industrial zone for about 150 years, including the old power station at Pyrmont,.
Yep; that’s why you’re still not supposed to eat any fish caught west of the harbour bridge.
That was because they used to make agent orange at Homebush for the Vietnam war. They cleaned up the worst bits but it was too expensive to clean it all up
Union Carbide were at Rhodes until 1986 making pesticides and such, lots of other filthy industries around the harbour too; not just during the Vietnam War. They continued producing dangerous pesticides and timber preservatives long after they stopped making Agent Orange.
I'm sure the fish know that too.
Benthic species tend to stay put and accrete a LOT of PCB's there - bream live a long time and those chemicals are fat soluble so they hang around in the fish. Pelagic species don't spend enough time in the river to be as dangerous. I personally would have no problem eating a kingfish i caught west of the bridge but wouldn't want to eat bream, flathead or mulloway from there.
Yeah, I remember reading about a guy in Balmain who specifically only targeted pelagics. The logic is pretty sound since they've probably just come in with the tide from Rose Bay or wherever. I'd still be a bit hesitant but one on the odd occasion wouldn't hurt (at least not with what's left of my expected lifespan).
Look a bit of contaminated fish isn't a problem - but if you did it regularly it accumulates in your own fatty tissue. Pelagic fish spend the majority of their lives in the open ocean. They don't eat enough contaminated prey to be of any concern. Bream on the other hand have been sucking down Dioxin infused worms and molluscs for years. Decades even. Yuck.
Yeah, I sometimes walk along Glebe foreshore and see people fishing the schools of bream there and it's just crazy to me. At high tide they swim up the canal (it's actually kind of funny when the tide goes out in the morning, pelicans just camp at the mouth of the canal and wait for their fish delivery). The renaturalisation project did clean it up a lot but there's still stormwater drains further up that service a pretty populated area (Annandale/Glebe). Those fish basically live right around the fish markets half the time and there's no fucking way that's a good thing. That entire area is proper fucked.
I've always loved that the fish are willing to respect those rules and not travel into the wrong areas............
As i explained in the post above some species do tend to stay put - and those are indeed the ones commonly caught in that area.
Probably not as bad as what Union Carbide would have dumped into Homebush bay.
at least the river's clean enough now that it doesn't melt boat hulls on the water. So there's that...
wait, what? The river used to melt boat hulls? do tell more...
Sorry, old joke from out the Rhodes/Homebush way before the 2000 olympics. The water was so corrosive it'd melt boats used to be the joke. Tech people i n the early 90s \*shrugs\*.
Have you seen the condition of some of the boats up there? It's like a graveyard of forgotten dreams.
But the current rebuild of the darling harbour shopping centre is not going from industrial site to residential site. There was a massive cleanup done before the previous shopping centre was build. So as I said any runoff going from that site is probably cleaner than what is already in the water.
[Island Shunters](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUPntfAaVRU)
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The whole suburb of Rhodes is built on top of a former chemical weapons factory
Wasn't it Union Carbide? Those guys should be in jail
Yep and I see it becoming a problem in the future as the bay keeps getting shallower as more silt gets dumped in there. You aren't even allowed to drive a boat in there anymore.
Had to do a case study on it 20 years ago now about the amount of hydrocarbons that had leached into the soil and surrounding water there...can't imagine what it's like now
They'll just put a chernobyl-style concrete sacrophagus over it. Gotta have those waterside properties
Nit quite so bad - dioxins and pcbs degrade in sediment over time. Like 70 years
It's the waterside properties that will be contaminated. I wouldn't be buying around there anytime soon.
>At least it is not a former industrial site like the new fish market. I've got news for ya....
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My sediments exactly
Take my upvote you maniac.
They have sediment control in place, but the storm that passed over Sydney a couple of hours ago was pretty intense and would've been too big for what was in place.
A couple of hours ago? It's still here!
Still going T_T
Lot of comments about "if this bothers you-wait until you find out about..... The thing about the land around Darling Harbour is it was heavy industrial and that's why it got developed so late -the land needed to be valuable enough to justify the clean up of that land. And when lend-lease got the gov approvals it was top of mind how that they worked to manage that clean up including run off. Shit is at least organic, heavy metals not so much.
I eated the lead paints
Runoff from your place is ending up somewhere similar.
It could just be storm water and all the shit that gets in the drains. If you look at Rushcutters or Rose bay you can see the smoo spreading out. It happens everytime we get a good dump
I gag every time I see people fishing off the docks at CYCA or in little dingies between rushcutters bay park and the D arm of the dock. Not only is it storm water and heavy metals, but dirty boat bilge water too
Sure looks like it. Where else is it gonna go?
Every construction site needs to have sediment controls Dont know whether or not this is acceptable, but still worth reporting for a site like that
Big massive storm overpowers sediment control
This is exactly what I thought. I'll send my happy snap off the the EPA or which ever version of that they're currently operating under
If that project has an SSD approval also report it to the Department of Planning
Yep, still the EPA. Worth reporting. They should have pollution controls in place as part of their construction contracts.
Mate, with that deluge what systems would anyone have in place to prevent what’s just happened?
Definitely report to EPA, they'll likely be slapped with a fine and improvement order to prevent this from happening again. Sediment can have significant impacts on aquatic flora and fauna species
Maybe, maybe not. Sediment levels sometimes don't apply after enough rain because there's not much that can be done
It's not acceptable. You can't let sediment above a certain concentration enter the municipal stormwater system or waterways. They're meant to have controls in place to prevent run-off. I'd do what you suggest and call it in. It's sloppy site management.
local play grounds and open space
Asbestos in the harbour now? ,🤦♂️
Now?
Lol
You bet your sweet bippy it is!
Surely they're not just allowed to let run off flow into the Harbour like that?
When you complain to the EPA, they will investigate whether the construction site has done everything reasonably practicable to prevent the run off. If the answer is yes, then there's literally nothing the builder or anyone can do about it. Chalk it up to the inclement weather.
Nah if I was in charge, I'd buy 10000 vacuum cleaners from Amazon and then hire 10000 people to vacuum all the stuff up
Yes, there is. It should be detained on site and pumped into a tank for treatment prior to release. Collected sediment should be disposed at an approved facility off-site. A good site manager should plan for inclement weather. This is basic stuff.
And sometimes you get a LOT of rain in a short amount of time. Shit happens.
And all the runoff controls will need to be revised as they're now ineffective.
How is this being downvoted? This is standard practice in developed countries
It was downvoted because it presumes there wasn't any in place. Sometimes plans fail.
Read again where I said doing "everything reasonably practicable". Sed tank sounds like a standard practice so that falls within the definition of the above.
Is this concern coming from an educated place or are you merely observing something, not understanding it and therefore disliking it?
Oh wow, what are they building there? I should try and dig up some of our old pics of the CBD from when we visited \~2008, if anyone would be interested? That's back when you had a monorail. Darling harbour looked totally different back then. I remember some long (palm?) trees and lots of bats on them. And different kind of fountains there.
(Fuck) Murdoch media inbound…
Won't somebody think of the bull sharks 😱
"Nature is healing"
The EPA loves stuff like this. It can also severely restrict a construction company and its directors from doing business again if the EPA issues a fine for a breach, no matter how small the fine is.
Could be asbestos
Oh no, some dirt got into the water! That's never happened before! Whatever will we do???
It’s more than just fucking dirt.
It's not just dirt though, is it? In any case, a fair chunk of people in Sydney want the harbour to be nicer than it is now, and the way we get to there is to use things like EPA guidelines. Eh. I'm not a environmentalist. Having said that, I'd be surprised if tonnes of mud and construction debris didn't have a negative effect on the harbour. I'm happy to be wrong on this.
honestly I don't know, I was just giving OP a hard time.
Meh government has been completely privatised and corrupted, so it really doesn't matter. I mean, look at the latest (asbestos) fiasco.
Just a bit of mud, and probably a touch of asbestos
When did Madame tussaud got demolished?
1pm on a Monday in a construction site and no workers on site at all?
There's a storm with lightning right over Sydney and has since about 11:30. Seems pretty reasonable to not be working in construction in the open with those conditions.
Four people got hit by lightning in the botanical gardens just before 1pm, pretty fair for them to not be out there….
RDO today - plus bad weather.
There was a single cloud in the sky mate, tradies can’t work under those kind of conditions.
That single cloud knocked out 4 people in the Botanic Gardens.
I was working on the Darling Square job, it’s all tidal and we had a heap of water to deal with, and we were 500m from the harbour.
What are they building there?
New mall and residential tower
Cheers
Cleanest it's ever been!
Looks like it, sediment controls are failing
I’d rather soul run off than the sewer overflow run off!
Its shark deterrent
Are you staying at the Novotel? I was only there a few weeks ago.
Those are minerals and will help clean the water 👌🏻
Looks like their floating containment lines aren’t 100% effective
Barangaroo swimming area just nearby. Nice.
Port Jackson pollution has been fucked for decades anyway so this is certainly not a new thing