Towards a punctual tolerance of wastewater discharges into the natural environment of the Arcachon Basin

Last winter, a similar episode of pollution caused contamination of oysters produced in the Basin and an epidemic of gastroenteritis among consumers during the end-of-year holidays. The sale of shellfish was banned for a month, much to the dismay of the oyster industry.

In April, the observation of new discharges of wastewater into the environment led the courts to order emergency measures to put an end to them, including the construction of "spillways", a solution proposed by the inter-municipal union which manages the sanitation of the Basin (Siba).

In order to be able to build them, the latter asked the prefecture to modify the regulations in force, within the framework of a "bring to attention" denounced by environmental protection associations as a "pollution permit".

"The Siba request aims to regulate these discharges as required by the judge," the prefecture justified in a press release on Wednesday.

"It is part of the Community and national regulatory framework in force for sanitation systems (...) which includes different mechanisms to take into account exceptional climatic events, and therefore one-off ones, which de facto lead to the overflowing of evacuation systems," she adds.

The prefecture therefore intends to grant the Siba's request and modify its orders accordingly, ensuring that "the exceptional discharges carried out will be subject to careful monitoring".

In particular, it plans to set up an "alert system", with the implementation by Siba of an "information protocol" as soon as the safety basins, supposed to regulate the sanitation network, "are 70% full" and thus threaten to saturate.

The Gironde prefect will gather the opinion of the Bassin d'Arcachon marine natural park on his amended draft orders before making a final decision on Siba's requests.

"It's the blessing of pollution. It's a rather worrying message," reacted the Arcachon Basin Environmental Coordination (Ceba), questioned by AFP.

"Given the SIBA's inability to provide a rapid solution using heavy-duty means, we ended up coming out of the case at the bottom. It is always the Basin that is the victim, it is the environment, it is oyster farming, it is fishing, and sometimes it is humans because we managed to poison probably a few tens of thousands of them a little over a year ago. This observation is quite distressing," noted its president Jacques Storelli, who will challenge the new orders in court when they are published.