[video: View from air of an Auckland beach, followed by a boat on the harbour. Cuts to a council staff member taking a water sample.]
Voice: Safeswim’s a tool that lets you go online really quickly and make some sensible decisions about going to the beach.
[video: Images from council Safeswim website]
Voice: It’s a website, pick it up on your phone – is the easiest way – and it will literally find where you are. It’ll take you to the closest beaches so it really is a quick process.
[video: Further shots of Auckland beaches, inter-cut with images of two council water testers collecting samples.]
Voice: Currently on the website, you’ll see over a hundred beaches in Auckland, but in fact we are taking water quality samples at over two hundred and forty.
[video: Images of water testers travelling to Piha and on Piha beach.]
Voice: We have team of full time people. They travel ‘round the region and monitor your beach. They’re our boots on the ground.
[video: Footage of Simone - an Auckland Council water tester - speaking to camera, inter-cut with footage of her collecting samples.]]
Voice: We normally sample around fifteen to twenty beaches a day. We also sample freshwater sites, such as rivers, lagoons and lakes – sometimes we go to very remote areas.
Voice: So it can be raining… It can be sunny, cloudy, very windy… So it doesn’t matter what the weather is – we’re out there sampling.
[video: Speaker is now Nick Vigar from council's Healthy Waters department. Video is inter-cut between images of water sampling collecting and shots of Piha's lifeguards looking out to sea and setting up equipment.]
Voice: So broadly speaking, we’ve got public health risk – you know, that’s the risk of getting sick. But the other key component is that we have a warning system for physical risks at the beach. It could be rips – it could be dangerous rips, in particular, it could be jellyfish, it could be sharks.
Voice: Surf Lifesaving Northern Region are a key programme partner. If they have a team at the beach, and their patrol captain decides that there’s a risk that the public needs to know about, they’ll put that up on the website. So within a matter of minutes of a hazard being identified – you can know about it.
[video: Images of community members from Laingholm Beach putting on water waders and collecting a water sample.]
Voice: So it’s really nice to be able to work with our community groups. Obviously, local groups are very engaged in whether their beaches are good to swim at.
[video: Speakers is Deirdre Green of Laingholm Beach. Shots of her talking to camera, inter-cut with images of different people collecting water samples.]
Voice: We were living right on this beach that we couldn’t use. So we had an infrastructure fix that we’d learnt about, we had an agency like Safeswim to guide us, put us on track and then we had the volunteers that we needed to participate in the reopening of something that had been taken away. So it was really cool.
Voice: We collected about a hundred and fifty individual samples. Safeswim said if it wasn’t for the quantity of sampling that we were able to achieve, we wouldn’t have been able to get the result that we needed.
[video: Speaker is now Nick Vigar again narrating of image of lab technicians processing water samples.}
Voice: The lab process for these sorts of tests means we’re having to wait something like thirty-six hours before we get a result back. Now you can imagine for all our beaches, around the region, that’s a lot of data and that’s why we have predictive models. So through our time monitoring a particular beach we might have many, many years of data and we take a look at that data and we understand when that beach is going high risk and that’s what you see on the Safeswim website.
[video: Images of people sailing small boats at a beach, and more shots of two Auckland Council water sample collectors in floppy sun hats.]
Voice: What we really want to see is for Aucklanders to get out there and enjoy their beautiful beaches and to do that as safely as possible.
[video: Images of sunny Auckland beaches taken from above.]
Voice: We’re hoping for a nice summer where people can do exactly that. But we hope that in doing that, people remember to check the website, safeswim dot org dot NZ. It’s worth a five-second check on Safeswim.