Revisiting the most poisoned lake in Ireland (what happens next?)

Back in August I published my most popular video ever, a video that to date has got over 1.5 million views and it was a story about how the largest lake on the island of Ireland has become completely poisoned and toxic over the summer months due to pollution causing this toxic bacteria, this blue-green algae to grow and today I'm heading back there to see how things are. Now that we're into autumn I'm starting off here at Antrim Castle Gardens, this place is a beautiful place to run at this time of year so let's go and kick some leaves. But on my way down to the lock I'm running through Antrim Castle Gardens, this place is absolutely beautiful in autumn with all the trees and the leaves and the spirals. That is all that's left of Antrim Castle, it used to stand right here and hang on, those lines of stones they mark what used to be the old perimeter. I think it burnt down in a fire. When we get down to the lock I will tell you, well I'll recap the story slightly but if you're really interested go and watch that full video but I'm going to tell you a little bit about the repercussions and what might be happening next as well. I'm experimenting a little bit with the cameras I use for this channel, I wanted to keep it super simple, I only use one camera and that lets me edit these videos quickly but I've been experimenting with different types of poles and accessories for the camera and I've got this really long pole with me today. So this is it about two feet from my face but I could extend it all the way to back there which I think gives you a much better impression of the environment I'm running through so you can let me know. Oh and the other thing is I'm shooting this on the DJI Action 5 Pro, they just released a bit rate update for this camera, if you don't know what that means basically it shoots, it now shoots higher quality video but that comes at the cost of battery life and the amount you can actually record. I like this bit, there's the otter pool that's the six mile water river, there's a one-eyed otter lives in there and if you come down here at certain times of the year you'll find photographers nearly at each other's throats over the most optimal spot to stand to take photographs of it. This is my go-to place to run when I want just a nice flat easy run because there's very few hills in the route I'm going to be doing today and also I live just about 10 minutes away from here so it's it's handy to get to. That's a promising sign, the river looks and it probably looks totally brown in this but if I put the camera down there you can see it doesn't look particularly appetizing but the water does look clear and that's crucial because in the middle of summer around about July this was completely bright green and smelt disgusting, we're almost at the lock itself here we are, lock now, perfectly clear water today but as I said in the middle of July this entire log had turned bright green and was toxic, you couldn't go into it, water sports had to stop, there were cases of dogs being poisoned, livestock being poisoned, search and rescue workers ended up getting sick through into the water, the algae that was in there, worst case scenario could kill you if you came in contact with it, best case scenario if you came in contact with it would make you kind of sick and the reasons for it go right back to the 1960s and arguably even further back to the 1940s and I made this video about it I'm not going to explain everything here you can go and watch that video if you want to find out but really what I want to talk about during this run has been the aftermath of that video because there have been a few things that have happened I suppose, one is that my channel got a massive boost from suddenly having a video that went over a million it's closest I've ever, well it's the first time I've ever got anything close to that, my next nearest highest number of views up to that point was around 300,000 so it was astonishing how many views it got and in the three months since I published that video everything on my channel has gone up it's just seems to boost it every other video on there having that successful video so from my channel's perspective it's been great and by the way I'm talking about my main channel not this one this is my third channel actually but my main one is Stephen J Reid and I'm close to 90,000 subscribers and it looks like I might hit 100,000 subscribers by Christmas which is just astonishing because at the start of the summer my realistic prediction for hitting 100,000 subscribers was still a year and a half away and that one video has brought it forward by over a year it's just yeah anyway so aside from that there have been some other fallout things that have happened as a result of that video so one thing that happened was the new environment minister for Northern Ireland sent me a DM on Instagram saying he'd seen the he'd liked the video and offered me the opportunity to go and see some of the work that's being done to try and fix some of the causes because it was about six different contributing factors but now that meeting was originally supposed to have happened in October but I have ignored it put it off probably until next year and here's my reason for that my reason is if I follow up that video now there's nothing to report because what happens is the algae comes during the summer and then we get to now to autumn where the higher rainfall the drop in the temperatures basically kills the algae off and then it gets flushed out of Loch Ness out to sea or it goes and settles on the bottom so there's nothing really to see um at this time of year for about a month after the algae dies off um something weird's going to happen every year in that depending on what is that a lot of people in Northern Ireland are going to slightly funny tasting water because 40% of the drinking water comes from Loch Ness and in certain areas um depending which way the wind has been blowing the wind blows all the dead algae in certain directions and if it blows it in the direction of one of the water extraction units everybody in that area will have funny smelling water for a few days now they say it's not toxic it's just a taste it's perfectly safe to drink but regardless it means you know who wants to drink swampy smelling water so that's going to happen every year but in general over winter there's nothing to see so I think I'm going to follow that video up maybe coming in the next spring next summer because I think that will be the more important point because the big question is is the algae going to come back next year again probably most likely it will come back most likely it will just be as bad if not worse than it was this year because you know in between the summer and now and next summer nothing significant is going to be done this is one of my favorite places down here this is mclelland's pint and nick mclelland knows exactly what I mean by that it's beautiful out here by the middle of summer again this smelt disgusting you came down here smell slurry smell of death smell of filth we're actually going to go to a spot where it was as bad as it gets and I want to see if there's anything left so I'm going to follow that video up but I'm not going to follow it up until the summer now however I've come across another kind of pollution related story in the meantime that I think I'm going to cover first because an environmental activist made me aware of a document and that document made me aware of some serious problems with Belfast lock the Belfast lock is a location that's renowned for its its mussels its seafood um as well as being a place where lots of wild swimmers go and bathe during the summer but there is a beach on Belfast lock and I've been there I've now been there and on that beach if you dig around you will find these weird matted clumps they're kind of like a gray white initially you'll think it looks like a mop and you pull on it and it might come out might be like three four feet long it's just disgusting looks like it looks like a drowned poodle it's horrible and that is a massive mess of wet wipes that have come straight out of the sewage system and straight into the sea you look around a little bit more and you will find oh a huge number of sanitary pads tampons tampon applicators toothbrushes dental floss um ear like um the plastic sticks from cotton buds just all kinds of disgusting bathroom related waste that in no way should be working its way into the lock and the most disgusting factoid I find because this is all happening because raw sewage is getting pumped directly into the sea the most disgusting thing is that at the outlets where the sewage comes out you'll quite often see seabirds and um ducks swimming around in the water the reason for that you know the way when you eat sweet corn it's never quite fully digested yep yep the ducks are eating the sweet corn and then the rest of the filth is washed out into the lock where it's being eaten by the mussels the uh the highly prized mussels that are then being sold to Brussels and places um in Europe and they're literally being fed on the waist of the people of Belfast so I think that's an interesting story and asides from that it's a story that people really really need to hear about because it absolutely should not be happening now there's a lot more to it than that and it's I've got to write a script before I can start making that video but I'm hopeful I'll get it done and out on the main channel before before the end of November and then wait for the backlash there's some politicians who would really prefer that attention wasn't brought to it at all and because there's money that could have been allocated to that and it's been taken and it's been spent elsewhere but also the general public are not going to like the video either because the conclusion um well I'll not give any more away oh listen hear the birds it's kind of a weird place down here it's this is reclaimed land originally the water levels in Lochney were about I think 20 feet higher 20 30 feet higher maybe but they drained it and dropped the level back in the 1930s and it was a long time ago actually it's probably further back than that could be 100 years ago so if you go that direction and you'll see me run out here you'll be climbing up a hill that hill was the original bank out of the water and where we are now was originally the lock bed because they drained it and it gave it had a huge extra amount of land because Lochney is 330 000 square kilometers so you drop that by 20 20 feet and that gives you an extra say I don't know 100 meters of shoreline that's a lot of extra space um I think it was mostly for agricultural farming and so on at the time so we've been meddling with Lochney for a very very long time so this right here this is the exact spot I shot the opening shot for that video and that opening shot was the thing that caught everybody's attention because this place just looked like it was completely covered in green slime it looks totally different now you can tell there's been quite a lot of rough weather because all this like organic matter here is washed up possibly that includes some of the remnants of the the algae but it doesn't smell anymore and the water here the water is it's crystal clear so I think it might be well I'm pretty confident that it is now okay to get back out on the water over winter which what I intend to do I haven't used my paddle board all summer and a day like that look how calm that is paddling out on that is just just bliss the question is for how long in the next year will that water remain clear last year the algae was starting to form around about the end of uh right end of May I went out on a paddle board around the end of May and I could just start to see the green particles forming because what typically happens is it takes once the once the air temperature is like over like 15 or something like that and you get a few sunny days that's typically when the extreme level of nutrients in the water allow the algae to cause those massive blooms so it's it's catch 22 because we want sunshine we want a bright summer because that's when you want to get out in the water that's when you want to start swimming but that's also the very thing that brings the algae back in force so yeah we'll just have to see at what point and when it returns next year um I think that will be the point where I will um try and get my follow-up video published because that's when people are going to be asking questions again anyway I've done 5k so far I've got about another maybe 5k to do um talking is slowing me down so I'm going to put the camera away finish the run here but thanks to all of you for getting me out running again and uh thanks for joining me on today's little run I'll catch you on the next one which I don't the next one will be I might occasionally put non-running content on here oh the next video I might make on here is going to be about these these headphones these are the shocks open run pro 2 I love these headphones I've been testing them now for a few months and I think it's time I made a dedicated video about them so yeah I'll do that bye