While Malta has failed to sufficiently sample and report the water quality of 46 of the 87 bathing spots it was meant to monitor last year, of the 41 that were actually sampled, six were found not to have met European Union minimum thresholds on bathing water cleanliness.

The bathing spots that do not meet EU minimum standards are: Sliema’s Exiles and Ghar id-Dud beaches, the left-hand side of St George’s Bay, the right-hand side of Xlendi Bay, the area near the Marsascala waterpolo pitch, and the beach at the bottom of Wilga Street in Paceville.

The results were made public on Friday by the European Commission in its Bathing Water Report for 2005, which highlighted Malta and Poland as having particularly dirty coastal areas.

The report additionally found that the water quality of 46 other bathing spots were either not sampled or were sampled insufficiently by Malta. While the list of bathing spots not sampled is rather extensive for reproduction here, these include: Qui-si-Sana and Tigné, Balluta Bay near Neptunes, six out of 10 bathing spots in Mellieha, Il-Qajjenza and the right-hand side of Pretty Bay in Birzebbuga.

Malta’s reluctance to provide comprehensive data on its bathing water quality is further reinforced by the fact that last year it failed to submit any data for 2004, as it was obliged to do by the EU’s Bathing Water Directive. This year Malta reported on less than half the beaches it was obliged to monitor.

Since Malta did not submit data for 2004, any improvement or further degradation of bathing water quality registered over 2005 could not be gauged.

From the bathing spots reported for 2005, 40.2 per cent of Malta’s beaches complied with the EU’s mandatory threshold, 33.3 per cent complied with the EU’s more stringent guide values and 60 per cent were either not sampled or did not meet with mandatory values.

In other words, of the 87 bathing spots monitored by Malta over 2005, 46 were insufficiently sampled or not sampled at all, 29 complied with the directive’s guide and mandatory thresholds, six complied with the mandatory thresholds alone, and six fell short of the mandatory thresholds.

This, the EC reported on Friday, implies that two-thirds of Malta’s beaches failed to comply with the minimum standards laid out by the Bathing Water Directive. The standards measure microbiological parameters for total coliforms and faecal coliforms; and the physico-chemical parameters of mineral oils, surface-active substances and phenols.

On the bright side, however, the EU expects Malta’s results for the bathing seasons ahead to be “appreciably improved” since most EU member States did not achieve the desired bathing water standards until several years after introducing and fully complying with the inspections required by the Directive.

The EU also expects the construction of three new sewage treatment plants, one in Gozo and two in Malta at a total cost of e73 million, to further improve bathing water quality and to help the islands comply with another Directive on Urban Waste Water.

Malta has also pledged to upgrade its monitoring requirements this summer so as to reduce the number of bathing areas being insufficiently or not sampled at all.

The EC’s full report can be found at: http://www.ec.europa.eu/water/water-bathing/report_2006.html