You're reading: Swimmers say water is clean, but government is dirty

 In spite of a ban imposed Aug. 6 on swimming in the Dnipro River, there was no shortage of sunbathers or swimmers the next day. Scores of people, showing a healthy disdain for government warnings, cooled off in the water on what has been registered as the hottest day in 112 years, with a high of 36 C

Coming out
of the water, Valentina Rudenko said she was aware of the ban but didn’t take
it seriously.

”If I’ve
been swimming here forever, you’d think that if something was wrong with the
water it would’ve manifested itself by now,” she said, drying herself off with
a towel.

The ban was
put in place primarily because the hot weather had created a good environment
for the growth of various bacteria that can cause severe diarrhea and nausea,
according to what the deputy head doctor of the Kyiv City Sanitary-Epidemiological
Station, Yuli Zhyhalov, told http://news.siteua.org/

The
swimmers the Kyiv Post talked with scoffed at the idea that the Dnipro could
make them sick, suggesting instead that the government wanted to avoid
responsibility for maintaining the beaches and to avoid liability in case
somebody did get sick.

”Instead of
taking responsibility, they put up a sign, and if something happens, ’It’s not
my fault,’” said Alexander Stanishevsky, 63, who has been swimming in the Dnipro
all his life.

Rudenko,
meanwhile, thinks the authorities are trying to save money.

”It’s all
an excuse to not take care of the beach,” she said, and thereby save money.

Asked
whether she had seen a decrease in visitors to the beach, a waterfront
salesperson said nothing had changed. She also didn’t trust the official
explanation for the ban.

”It’s not
the water that’s dirty, it’s the government,” said Nataliya, who asked that her
last name not be used for fear that her business could be targeted by the authorities.

Still,
Zhyhalov said that more than 500 tests had shown that there were a lot of
contaminants in the water. Zhyhalov said that swimming could be prohibited till
the end of the season if the microbiological indicators do not improve, Zahylov
said at a press conference.

The sanitation
department was not immediately available to respond to the allegations.

Kyiv Post staff writer Jesper Larsen can be
reached at [email protected] and Feder
Zarkhin can be reached at [email protected]