From 1 December 2022, Northland Regional Council has joined the Safeswim platform which is a joint initiative between Auckland Council, Surf life Saving New Zealand, Northland Regional Council and others.
Safeswim provides live information on the conditions at many of the popular swimming sites around Northland. The site provides a three day forecast on water quality, tides, weather information and if the beach is currently lifeguarded.
Decide with Safeswim
Occasionally some of our swimming spots will have issues with water quality, particularly following heavy rainfall. The aim of the programme is to provide live information on water quality at popular freshwater and coastal swimming sites in Northland, to allow the public to make an informed decision about whether a site is suitable or not for swimming.
About our monitoring – what’s new?
Previously, we have run the Recreational Swimming Water Quality Programme (RSWQP) during the summer months collecting water samples at our freshwater and coastal swimming sites and testing for faecal indicator bacteria.
We have been running this programme for over 20 years and using this data we have developed models including information from rain intensity, duration and location as well as tide, wind speed and direction and sunlight to predict the risks of swimming.
Instead of single sampling on a weekly basis we can now provide live information on the risk of swimming.
This doesn’t mean we will no longer be sampling our beaches. We will continue to sample all our popular freshwater and coastal swimming sites to ensure accuracy and will continue to carry out investigations when there are consistently poor results.
For more information and to see the swimming conditions at your favourite swimming spot head to: safeswim.org.nz
For previous results, visit: Land Air Water Aotearoa (LAWA) | lawa.org.nz
