Australia shuts dozens of beaches in Sydney and the east coast after shark attacks

SYDNEY: Dozens of beaches along Australia's east coast, including in Sydney, closed on Tuesday (Jan 20) after four shark attacks in two days, as heavy rains left waters murky and more likely to attract the animals.

Beaches around Port Macquarie, around 400km north of Sydney, were shut after a man was bitten while surfing earlier in the day. He remains in hospital in a stable condition, health authorities said.

"If ‍you're thinking about going for a ⁠swim, ‍think of going to a local pool because at this stage, we're advising that beaches are unsafe," Steven Pearce, the chief executive of Surf Life Saving New South Wales (NSW), told reporters on ⁠Tuesday.

"We have such poor water quality that is really conducive to some bull shark activity."

The closures come in the middle of ‍the Southern Hemisphere summer, when beaches across Australia are normally packed with locals and tourists.

SHARK ATTACKS

Two people were attacked while surfing on Sydney's northern beaches on Monday.

In one of those attacks, a shark bit a man's legs as he surfed at Manly, leaving him in a critical condition.

Eyewitness Max White said another surfer had kept the man alive using his board's leg rope as a makeshift tourniquet to stem the bleeding.

"He was breathing, but he was unconscious, and we just ... tried to keep him awake," he told state ‌broadcaster ABC.

Paramedics treated the man for serious leg injuries before taking him to hospital in critical condition.

A few hours earlier, an 11-year-old boy escaped unharmed when a shark took a bite out of his surfboard a little further north.

On Sunday afternoon, a 12-year-old boy was seriously injured as he swam at a beach on Sydney Harbour.

"It was a horrendous scene at the time when police attended. We believe it was something like a bull shark that attacked the lower limbs of that boy," said Superintendent Joseph McNulty, New South Wales marine area police commander.

"That boy is fighting for his life now," he told reporters on Monday.

BRACKISH WATER

The shark attacks follow days of heavy rain that washed into the harbour and nearby beaches, creating ideal conditions for the bull ‌sharks suspected to be behind some of the attacks. The species thrives in brackish water.

Sharks do not normally attack humans, but the turbid water reduces their visibility and raises the risk of them bumping into something, at which point "they defensively or curiously bite and then bite again", Chris Pepin-Neff, an academic and expert on shark behaviour, wrote in a column in the Sydney Morning Herald newspaper.

Heavy rain also increases sewage runoff, drawing in bait fish that sharks feed on, he added.

Australia sees around 20 shark attacks per year, with fewer than three of those being fatalities, according to data from conservation groups. ‌Those numbers are dwarfed by drownings ‌on the country's beaches.