tting from sailors who are training there — just from the visual view of the water — that already there are some concerns. ... It’s on our radar.”
Rio organizers have been pressed by the International Olympic Committee to speed up building venues. Cleaning the water could add to delays in preparing for the games, which will cost about $15 billion in public and private money.
“Rio 2016 can guarantee beyond any doubt that no athlete, official or member of the Olympic family will be put at risk,” Rio organizers said in a statement to AP. “The health and welfare of the athletes is always our top priority.”
Rio organizers added that water quality was the responsibility of the state government.
“We trust that the authorities will deliver the conditions to enable the athletes to compete to the very best of their ability in 2016,” organizers added.
The 2008 Beijing Olympics were impacted by the city’s choking air pollution, which gave the city a black eye as the government tried to use the games to portray China as a rising, prosperous world power.
Carlos Minc, secretary for the environment for the state of Rio de Janeiro, acknowledged the bay’s contamination has been festering for years.
The Rio state’s INEA environmental agency has classified nearly all the 13 bayside beaches it monitors as “terrible” for 12 years running due to high levels of fecal bacteria. Exposure to such bacteria can cause gastro-intestinal illnesses like cramps, diarrhea, dysentery and cholera.
“That the bay is rotten and the beaches are polluted, everyone has known this for 20 years,” Minc said Thursday in an interview in O Globo newspaper. “This is nothing new. ... What is new is that now we have a different response than before.”
Minc said the state government had closed 10 landfills around the bay, though illegal ones were still operating. He said some industrial pollution had been curbed , and programs were in the works to retrieve floating garbage and install river treatment units — so-called RTU’s built over rivers that filter most of the trash and human waste before it pours into open water.
Environmentalists see the RTU’s as stopgap measures.
Minc also mentioned that co-operation was needed from Rio’s city government.
Many delays in preparing the Rio Olympics have been caused by conflicts between Brazil’s three levels of government — local, state and national.
The local organizing committee has yet to announce an operating budget, stalled because of long negotiations about which level of government will pay, and how much.
Marco Aurelio Sa Ribeiro, president of the Brazilian Sailing Confederation, acknowledged the bay was dirty, but said the sailing was good.
“Clearly the Guanabara Bay is not the cleanest place in the world, but it is a great place for sailing,” he said in an interview. “Every year at least one world championship is held here. ... The foreign sailors are extremely pleased. The wind is fantastic and the view is wonderful.”
“With 10 million people living around here, of course there is waste and sewage,” he added.
Follow Stephen Wade at http://twitter.com/StephenWadeAP
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