Swords Tidy Towns volunteers took part in the Irish WaterBlitz event for a second year in a row.
This year’s event took place later in the year 7th – 10th of October in conjunction with Earthwatch Europe and was again hosted by the DCU Water Institute.
The 2022 WaterBlitz was open to organisations around the country like our group that have an interest in checking and maintaining the water quality of their local river, stream or lake. The aim was to collect as much data as possible through the FreshWater Watch app to determine the status of waterbodies nationwide, celebrating the cleanest waterbodies and identifying pollution hotspots.
WaterBlitz event was a brilliant opportunity for our volunteers to participate in a Citizen Science initiative. This year we had three teams to test five different locations of our local River Ward. Each team had two STT volunteers and two TY students from a local Fingal Community College. It has been a very enjoyable and educational experience for all involved.
Unfortunately the results are nothing to be happy about – they indicate elevated Nitrate levels in all spots tested in the River Ward with some receiving only “Poor” status.
The data will be further analised by the DCU Water institute and results available at a later date.
Roll on WaterBlitz 2023!
You can read about our participation in last year’s event here.
Swords Tidy Towns 