Real-time Thames water map confirming raw sewage discharge | pollution

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The market town of Fairford, nestled in the Cotswold Hills, is perhaps best known for its church, which contains the only complete set of medieval stained-glass windows in England.

But thanks to a more recent phenomenon, an interactive digital map produced by Thames Water, the town of Gloucestershire, with its traditional honey-coloured limestone houses, is better known for its bubbling, gushing raw sewage.

As of last Wednesday, a storm surge from the city’s sewage works discharged untreated, diluted effluent into the Colne River Limestone and Limestone for 625 hours in a stream of effluent that first began on December 23 of last year.

For Andrew Doherty, a local resident and LDP borough councilor, a digital map of sewage discharge doesn’t tell him anything new. Standing on the banks of the Coln, opposite an overflow pipe that pumps untreated dilute effluent into the river for 625 hours, Doherty said the problem was long-standing and attributed to a lack of investment by Thames Water over many years.

“There is a serious backlog of work to be done,” he said. “This is the headwaters of the Thames. This is where it all begins, here in the Cotswolds and yet that is what happens. This is not something that should happen in the third decade of the 21st century.”

The Colne, a limestone river once famous for its crystal clear appearance and abundance of trout, is not the only Cotswold river to receive continuous raw sewage discharges over hundreds of hours from the Thames water treatment works.

District Councilor Andrew Doherty, pictured as untreated, diluted sewage is being poured into the River Colne for 625 hours, in a dump that began on December 23, 2022. Photograph: Graeme Robertson/The Guardian

A few miles away, the Ampney St Peter treatment works have been pouring untreated effluent into the Ampney creek for 656 hours since December 20, according to the Times map. It stopped briefly early last week, but started emptying again on Wednesday.

“Ten years ago this was a beautiful example of a wild trout stream,” said David Ringer, Cotswold flyfishers vice president. “But the double whammy of the overabundance of the Thames waters in the summer, and the winter storm discharges from the Ampney Works, perhaps the worst spills in this region, mean they are no longer so.”

Public awareness of the volume of raw sewage discharged into the Thames via storm flooding has increased sharply since the company this month launched its digital map which identifies discharges as they happen.

The Thames Water map was a response to pressure from activists such as Ash Smith, a water campaigner from the Windrush group against wastewater pollution, a few miles away in west Oxfordshire, and finally to the Environment Act, which has imposed a new duty on water companies to publish near-real-time information. About storm surge operations.

Thames Water’s real-time sewage release map, on 11 January 2023, showing sewage flows recorded in waterways in the area controlled by the company. Photo: Leon Neal/Getty

There are floods in the sewer system to prevent effluent from building up on the property in exceptional circumstances, such as during heavy rain. But evidence from activists such as Smith, and the academic Peter Hammond, has shown that water companies routinely use stormwater drainage in their water management.

Data from water companies showed that in 2021, they discharged raw sewage by storm surge into rivers 372,533 times, over a period of 2.75 million hours.

Flooding continued in the Colne and other Cotswold rivers until last week, days after the end of a period of heavy rain. Doherty explained that this is because groundwater entered the sewer pipes as the water table rose and floods continued to operate for several days after the rains had ended.

“There are long sewage pipes everywhere and through those that water enters,” he said. “You can tile and seal pipes, but doing that costs money and we don’t tend to get a lot of investment in an area like this because our population is so rural, and relatively small.”

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Dry spills, which occur when heavy rain has stopped, are not permitted under Environment Agency rules. A common cause of dry spills, Hammond said, is groundwater seeping through cracks and joints in the pipes that carry wastewater.

His evidence that water companies in England were responsible for at least 10 times more illegal sewage spills than the agency was aware of sparked an investigation by Ofwat and EA into the possible illegal dumping of raw sewage by six water companies, including the Thames.

For Smith, a retired police detective and fisherman, the new Thames Water map provides welcome transparency but changes nothing. “He’s created a lot of interest in what’s going on, it’s been great. He should be pressuring the darker water companies to do the same. But nothing has changed, and the rivers are still being used as a toilet.”

In Witney, a town on the River Windrush, hundreds of hours of continuous raw sewage spills since the end of last year have been starkly shown by the Thames water map. As of Wednesday morning, the Whitney treatment plant has been dumping diluted effluent into Colwell Creek, which feeds into Windrush, for 607 hours and 20 minutes, in a spill that began Dec. 28.

Smith dips his underwater camera into the stream, pointing at the sewage fungus covering plant roots, or breaking loose and flowing down the cloudy river. Under a footbridge near the entrance to Lake Whitney and Country Park, the smell of sewage reeks.

“It was a healthy stretch of water,” said Smith. “It killed fish in 2016 when 1,700 fish were killed here, so this was a healthy piece of water. Today there are no more 1,700 fish here to kill more, so the pollution that is happening now is not classified as a serious pollution event.”

Thames Water said: “Our current investment programme, which is fully funded, will deliver significant increases in processing capacity at many of our sites. This includes an £8.5m upgrade to the wastewater works at Witney, which has begun and will increase the site’s treatment capacity by 60%, and is expected to be completed in early 2024. The sewage works at Fairford and Ampney St Peter will also receive significant increases in processing capacity.

“We are fully committed to protecting and enhancing our rivers and the communities that love them, and we want to make diluted sewage discharge unnecessary as quickly as possible.

“We are the first company to offer these alerts for inland waters… We want to lead the way with this transparent approach to data. The alerts will be available through an open data platform for third parties, such as swimming and environmental groups, to use.”

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