Protest outside Southern Water's Your Water Matters event in Hastings Old Town on October 12 2023.

Transcript

00:00 My name's Becca and I've been campaigning with Clean Water Action Group since July 2021

00:07 when we first had a burst sewage pipe at Balboa Hive which spilled raw sewage onto our beaches

00:15 and flooded beach huts down there, if anyone remembers that.

00:19 That was fun wasn't it?

00:21 Two years ago and for two years we have been shouting and banging our drums about this issue.

00:31 Have we got anywhere? There's a good question.

00:33 Well there's been a lot of media attention on the issue and I think we all need to give ourselves a round of applause for that

00:40 because we're keeping it in the media and the politicians know it's a real vote winner or vote loser too

00:48 so that's really good news.

00:50 We are continuing to test the water. You guys helped us raise a couple thousand last year

00:58 and we tested the water down at St. Ports Way.

01:02 We have continued to find high levels of faecal bacteria and E.coli in the water down there.

01:09 Just to test last week we did, returned a 720 reading of E.coli.

01:17 I don't think Southern Water have been here over the summer but we have and what we've had is a terrible summer

01:24 whereby in fact I did the figures and I found out you couldn't actually get in the water

01:29 on more days than you could get in the water.

01:33 54% of the days in Hastings or the beach where I swim at which is in Marina

01:43 and it's actually lifeguard which means that our council is paying to have lifeguards standing there

01:49 we couldn't actually get in the water.

01:51 So 54% of the time over the summer our lifeguards were just there to tell people to get out of the water

01:58 so whatever they're doing it's not enough, it's not fast enough and we expect better

02:04 and we have every right to expect that and so we're here really to tell people that they have some power

02:12 and they have rights and there's information out there and we've collected it all together

02:17 to tell them exactly what they can do to make their voices heard

02:22 and to remind them that they won't be alone. There's many of us doing this now.

02:26 [crowd noise]