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Language: en-GB

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It looks inviting, but you wouldn't want to
swim in there.

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That is dark and lonely water.

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It looks toxically blue, and it is. It's alkaline,
it's got a pH above 11, it would be like swimming

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in dilute bleach. Not enough to cause immediate
injury, but enough to irritate your skin and

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your eyes over time. Enough to cause some
problems a day or so later.

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It would feel like if you'd washed with soap
and then didn't rinse it off, just let it dry.

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That alkaline comes from limestone. This is
an old limestone quarry, leaching calcite

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crystals into the water. It can't be drained,
where would you pump it to? It'd just harm

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the local water supply then fill up with rainwater
and become toxic again.

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Only a fool would ignore this,

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but there's one born every minute.

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But for a while, this wasn't the Blue Lagoon,
this was the Black Lagoon. And the black wasn't

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dangerous: it was black dye, put in by the
local council. It was harmless. But that blue:

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that's inviting. The black, with the dye in,
it was just as toxic, it was just as unhealthy,

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it was just as likely to make you ill. It
was just as likely to give you a nasty fungal

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infection a few days later because you'd accidentally
bleached part of your body, but: blue water.

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That's tropical seas, sunshine and holidays.
Black water?

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Oh, we don't want to swim in that.

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Dying this water black was a genius idea.
It did more than a hundred warning signs ever

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could. And it meant that a lot of people didn't
end up getting ill from swimming.

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But now it's 2015: the Blue Lagoon is blue
again and I guarantee you, this summer someone

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is going to bleach themselves.

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