> Continuous water testing at the city limits also sounds impractical
Why? Surely a small team of a few people could have that as their job, and it would be completely worth it, to help keep all the people that want to swim safe.
And like, aside from the manual testing of the water that this team would do once or twice per day probably, they could have a few different sensors to catch some of the most likely kinds of pollution.
On top of that add hefty fines and maybe even a year or two of jail time for anyone caught dumping pollutants into the river, and you have a good disincentive against polluting the water.
And have a strong sense of pride of nature in the country so that people will naturally want to be mindful of the environment we live in. Promote this kind of thinking in schools and in public service announcements (billboards, ads, etc) from the government.
It's not technically impossible to continuously monitor a river, but as the neighboring comments shows, it's kinda of cutting edge stuff and basically nobody is doing it. It's also very much not cheap. Pinpointing where upstream someone dumped stuff in the middle of the night is virtually impossible
Why? Surely a small team of a few people could have that as their job, and it would be completely worth it, to help keep all the people that want to swim safe.
And like, aside from the manual testing of the water that this team would do once or twice per day probably, they could have a few different sensors to catch some of the most likely kinds of pollution.
On top of that add hefty fines and maybe even a year or two of jail time for anyone caught dumping pollutants into the river, and you have a good disincentive against polluting the water.
And have a strong sense of pride of nature in the country so that people will naturally want to be mindful of the environment we live in. Promote this kind of thinking in schools and in public service announcements (billboards, ads, etc) from the government.