Until Joseph Bazalgette built London’s sewer system, The Thames was the biggest open sewer in the world. It took the sewage from the biggest city in the world, the effluent from tanneries, abattoirs and factories, dead dogs and all manner of rubbish from a city which had no proper refuse disposal system. Being a tidal river, all that filth washed to and fro twice a day.

 The summer of 1858 was unusually hot and consequently, the stench from the river was unbearable. It penetrated the houses of parliament to such an extent that drapes soaked in sodium hypochlorite were hung at the windows.

Bazalgette’s sewers eased the problem considerably, but since his time, next to nothing has been done.

From 3 million population in 1850, London has grown to 9.5 million.

That the Victorian sewers can take the waste of that three-fold increase in population  ─  and still growing  ─ is amazing. Of course, the truth is that they can’t. Hence the frequent emptying of thousands of tons of untreated sewage into the Thames. That filth gets washed up and down the Estuary each day, churning with the sediment of yesteryear, the remains of the filth of centuries before there were any sewers.

Whitstable, on the estuary, is one of Londoners’ nearest and dearest resorts.  I hope they know in what they are swimming ─ diluted sewage. Whitstable is famous for its shellfish. I will never eat it.

The excuse given by Thames Water for returning the Thames to its medieval condition is that heavy rainfall increases the volume of the sewers’ content so much that it has to be released into the river as an alternative to it backing up into the streets and peoples’ homes.

This is grotesque baloney. It is released into the Thames as the chosen alternative to investing in bringing the system from the 19th to the 21st century. Sewage and surface water flow into same system and overwhelm it.

Sewage and surface water should have separate systems, separate pipes and treatment plants. That would cost a lot of money, but Thames Water makes gigantic profits and pays its executives obscenely big salaries and perks.

The government has stood idly by while this criminal damage to the environment has been perpetrated. The Chinese owners of Thames Water are not much concerned about the state of London’s river, just so long as their dividends keep flowing.

Thames Water is not the only company polluting on a grand scale.

Water companies are dumping raw sewage into rivers and coastal waters from overflow pipes at hundreds of locations across the country.

These pipes are supposed to have permits and are supposed to be monitored.

Welsh Water, to take one putrid company as an example, has 184 unofficial discharge pipes, which by definition are not monitored.  Only the company will know how much filth is illegally being discharged and it is not telling. Across the country as a whole, there are at least 870 unregistered and unmonitored discharge pipes.

In August 2022, 40 beaches were declared unfit for swimming due to sewage discharge.

In 1965, I was swimming off the beach at Livorno, Italy. I noticed that I was surrounded by millions of tiny brown spherical animals. Being a student of zoology, I was curious to know what they were. Were they a Mediterranean species of sponge or sea gooseberry?Then I spotted a piece of toilet paper, soiled  toilet paper, floating among these creatures. Realisation struck me and I made for the beach and a shower as fast as possible. This sort of experience has been repeated thousands of times this summer, around our coasts and in the Cumbrian lakes. And yet the year is 2022, not 1622.

Brexit has worsened the problem.  The little regulation there was within the EU has been abandoned in the government’s eager “bonfire of the regulations,” much touted by Liz Truss.

Despite the fouling of our beaches, lakes and rivers by the unscrupulous water companies, the bosses of 22 water firms shared a total of£24.8 million, including £14.7 million in bonuses and benefits over the past 12 months, representing a 21 per cent rise compared to 2020-21.

The Environment Agency, which is responsible for checking on the water utilities has suffered massive staff cuts over recent years, thanks to the government’s austerity drive and carefree attitude towards regulation and environmental standards, said in July 2022 that water bosses should  face jail for the pollution incidents they allow. We can be certain that most illegal releases go undetected and, instead of jail, the culprits are richly rewarded.

There was opportunity, during the passage of the recent Environment Bill to make it a legal duty on water firms to reduce untreated sewage discharges. Even such a lame measure was opposed by the government. Why? Because this is the government of big business and share-holders, not a government intent on protecting the environment, wildlife and people.

The official Opposition made nothing of this scandal. It should have been demanding renationalisation of this key utility, but it is too lame.

(the statistics in this blog are taken from a Channel 4 Dispatches programme)

SEPTIC TANKS

I holiday on the banks of Loch Awe in Argyll. Driving along the side of the Loch, one goes over strips of asphalt, one after another,  representing excavations for buried overflow pipes from scores of septic tanks,  belonging to loch-side houses, which discharge into the Loch.

The septic tank, nowadays made of plastic or fibreglass,  is a spherical settling chamber receiving sewage and grey water (washing and washing-up water) from the house. Solids sink to the bottom of the chamber and undergo a process of bacterial decay over time, while the water is led out to a  soakaway hole, where it seeps through the soil.

Since 2020 it has been illegal for the overflow to be led to a stream or other open water. However, the septic tank is a very basic system of sewage treatment and should be subject to regulation, which it is not. For example, the accumulated sediment should be removed by a sludge-sucker every few years, in order to ensure that as little as possible of the sediment is carried in the overflow.