In a post on its website, the municipality warned against swimming at Hovedøya, Gressholmen, Lindøya, Bleikøya, Bekkelagsbadet, Sørenga, Bispekilen and outside the Oslo Opera House
“With the rainy weather last weekend, there has been a discharge of contaminated waste water,” Jean-Yves Manum Gallardo, from the Oslo Municipal Water and Sewage Administration, told the NTB newswire. “Swimming in the sea in the innermost part of the Oslofjord and on the islands is therefore not recommended this weekend.”
The sewage spill happened when a major pipe was destroyed during heavy rain over the weekend, after which 130m litres of untreated sewage flowed into the Alnaeleva river and then on into the Oslofjord.
“It is quite intense. We have never experienced the equivalent of what happened to the system in the Water and Sewerage Agency,” Frode Hult, emergency manager at the Water and Sewage Administration, told public broadcaster NRK.
In a press release, the administration said that the leak had been repaired, but that there was still some sewage being discharged into the river and into the fjord.
The municipality expects to keep the recommendation not to swim in place until Wednesday at the earliest.
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