If you are like me, when you think of a beach, you think of vacation, sun, white sand, lawn chairs with umbrellas, and a frosty drink that contains slices of fruit. But, that is not always the case with many of the world’s beaches. Some are nasty, polluted places that no one wants to visit.
While many are fighting today to protect oceans and beaches, many are still in need of a lot of help. Such is the plight of the Chowpatty Beach in Mumbai, India. The beach is filled with debris, including remains of salvaged ships. And if it weren’t bad enough already, it got much worse in 2011 when the cargo ship MV Rak sank off the coast, spilling 60,000 metric tons of coal into the ocean.
Port Phillip Bay in Melbourne, Australia is another sadly polluted beach. The SuperSprint Gatorade Triathlon Series had to cancel the swimming part in 2010 because the waters were so unsafe. What’s up with the water? Well, for starters, over 300 stormwater drains empty into the bay. And the beach itself isn’t any better. Officials have admitted that the sand is littered with needles, presumably from drug addicts. Ick.
Odaiba Beach in Tokyo, Japan is an artificial island that looks beautiful. Again, you just don’t want to enter the waters. That’s because there are sewage plants upstream that pollute the water with fecal matter. The good news is that the government has allotted $6.8 million to help clean up the 1,800 foot beach.
Fishermen have a hard time seeing fish through the murky waters of Marunda Beach in Jakarta, Indonesia. Despite the fact that the water is filled with trash and dark cooking oil (dumped from a nearby factory), it still attracts many visitors.
Haina Beach in the Dominican Republic has a large amount of lead in its soil. Seriously, who wants to visit a beach nicknamed Dominican Chernobyl? All the lead came from a former lead-acid battery recycling smelter and it’s so bad that the population there has one of the highest levels of lead poisoning in the world.
Tomorrow, I’ll talk about more polluted beaches.