New Bathing Watering Monitoring Initiative For River Severn in Shrewsbury
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00:00I'm Councillor Alex Wagner, I'm the Deputy Leader at Electra Shropshire Council.
00:03We're here today because there's this fantastic development, which is a wild bathing app for
00:07Shropshire, which is going to be trialled in Shrewsbury over the bathing period this
00:11summer.
00:12It's really exciting because it's going to help public information, hopefully help tourism
00:15and help the companies who do water sports and other activities on the river and generally
00:20make the most of the River Seven, which is what we want.
00:23I'm Matt Smith, I'm the programme manager for the River Seven Partnership Advanced Wireless
00:27Innovation Region, which is a programme supported by Shropshire Council, managed by Shropshire
00:32Council, and we invest in lots of different types of technology, wireless technology, across
00:38the water sector and agricultural sector to try and encourage people to make better use
00:43of wireless technology and benefit from the efficiency and productivity that I can bring.
00:48This particular project is focused on water quality and in particular understanding the
00:52bacteria levels within rivers, and it's something we've trialled initially in Ludlow, and in
00:57that we've got back in February, February to March, and now we're bringing to Shrewsbury,
01:02and both of those sites are wild bathing sites, designated wild bathing sites, so we'll
01:06get a really, really dense set of data and give us a real accurate picture of what's going
01:10on on the river.
01:11The idea with the app is that, and it's currently available at Ludlow, so if you are in Ludlow,
01:15you're doing a wild swimming at Ludlow, you can go on there and understand the daily
01:18risk rating of going to the river.
01:20That'll come to Shrewsbury as well, so from August.
01:24The real benefit is accessibility, you know, actually it's easy for people to use, it's
01:28easy for people to understand, and I think the team from Shropshire Blue Tits were saying
01:31that there's well over 300 people who do cold water swimming in Shropshire at the moment.
01:36It's a growing activity.
01:37Actually, we want to encourage that and make it as safe as possible, and the work that the
01:41team have done is pretty incredible really, you know, genuinely inspiring.