Portuguese declare war on rising tide of pollution
Portuguese declare war on rising tide of pollution
By Helena Pozniak
LISBON (Reuter): If romantic poet Lord Byron were alive today, he might not leap into Portugal's Tagus estuary with the same relish as he did nearly 200 years ago.
"I am very happy here," the poet wrote in 1809 during his travels. "I swims (sic) the Tagus all across at once."
Later in the 19th century it became fashionable for courting couples and Lisbon gentry to bathe in the river estuary from boats moored just off the city center waterfront.
But stinking industrial waste, shipping and raw sewage have conspired to make the water around the capital a hostile zone for marine life and human swimmers.
Dolphins fled the Tagus 20 years ago and sun seekers avoid the dirty river mouth beaches in favor of more distant shores.
Some tourists caught skin rashes from the dirty sand last year and several beaches are littered with used condoms and the discarded hypodermic needles of drug addicts.
Just upstream from the port of Lisbon, thousands of tons of rubbish have sat for 20 years amid the "no dumping" signs next to a disused oil refinery.
Nearby, untreated sewage from more than a million people flows freely into the Trancao, a filthy creek whose permanent stench sickens motorists crossing the bridge that spans it.
"I wouldn't swim around here for sure," said German scientist Stefan Harzen, who leads a dolphin observation project in the much less polluted Sado estuary, 60 kilometers (38 miles) away.
The government has promised a massive clean-up of the Trancao and the refinery site which will be transformed into the venue for Expo 98.
Lisbon hopes to eclipse Seville, which hosted the last universal exposition in 1992, and attract 10 million visitors with an array of international pavilions on the desolate site.
Perhaps as a spur to adopting cleaner habits, it has made the study and preservation of the world's oceans the theme of the 1998 world fair.
Sorry state
The River Douro which enters the sea in Portugal's second city Oporto is in an equally sorry state and most of the country's other estuaries are badly polluted.
Industrial expansion in the city of Setubal in the 1980s wiped out oyster beds in the Sado estuary, factory discharges have warmed its increasingly murky water and noisy pleasure boats have disturbed its dwindling population of dolphins.
Their carcasses occasionally wash up along the shoreline, making headlines in the Portuguese press. Although no direct link between pollution and waning dolphin colonies has been established, Harzen urges caution.
"We have a choice. The Tagus used to have dolphins, and they are no longer there. Do we really want to drive them out of the Sado too?" he asks.
"Water pollution is a problem that will grow and grow and grow," he added. "People think because they can't see something, it won't hurt them."
Increasingly, disgruntled beach-goers are able to see what others have thrown away. Each tide along the beaches near the northern city of Oporto throws up an ugly yellow froth and a cluttered line of debris.
Portugal's environment is no lost cause. Large-scale industrial development began only 30 years ago and the country has escaped much of the ravages wrought in north and eastern Europe by more than a century of heavy pollution.
A report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development concluded that the government lacked the power and the knowledge of how to monitor and punish unscrupulous companies that dumped untreated waste into rivers.
Without further action, pollution would get worse, it said.
Top concern
The center-right government has listed pollution as one of its top concerns and President Mario Soares plans a special two-week tour of Portugal this month to highlight areas of environmental concern.
Installations responsible for contaminating Portugal's rivers range from pig farms to pulp plants and cement factories without proper waste treatment facilities.
The government has vowed to clean up Portugal's worst pollution by the end of the century with a 900 billion escudo ($5 billion) plan to be financed partly by industry.
"There's a nationwide awareness that this can't continue," said one Environment Ministry official. "Cleaning-up projects are beginning in most of the worst cases," she added.
But there are few success stories so far.
The government is betting on a new sewage system for Lisbon to clean up the Tagus and entice bathers back to the once popular beaches of its seaside suburbs of Estoril and Cascais.
"It's still not too late to avoid the scale of damage elsewhere in Europe -- we're at the stage other countries were about 20 years ago. But it seems you have to bring people to the emotional edge here before they act," Harzen said.