How much sewage is in your local river?

I came across this Rivers Trust web portal the other day when I was looking for some water quality data for a catchment. This is an issue that is really close to my heart and am glad that an institution has finally got access to and published the data that shows the shocking state of our often Victorian era sewer network. You probably think that everything flows from your house to the nearest waste water treatment works where it is magically cleaned before being emitted into the nearest river and at no point does the water quality of the local river get impacted by your activity. Well that is where you would be wrong. When we have a major rainfall event and all the runoff from those paved over front yards hits the combined sewerage network (combined household waste and street runoff) the system often can’t cope and “Combined Sewer Overflows” or CSO’s come into play. Basically, to deal with the overload, raw sewage from the network is emitted into the local river to deal with the excess runoff. The argument that is put forward to justify this practice is that the higher flows in the river associated with the situation will dilute the pollution emitted directly into the river. Heaven forbid that we manage our catchments and sort the root cause of the issue out, rather we pollute the local river and impact the environment and users of that environment. In future with more extreme rainfall likely as a function of our changing climate this situation will become more frequent and more severe.

There are currently no designated bathing waters in UK rivers. This means recreational river users —anglers, swimmers, canoeists, paddlers, you name it — are at risk every time they wade in to the water. We want to introduce bathing water standards for well-used rivers across the UK, so you can swim, paddle, catch and play without worrying about pollution.

Rivers Trust

The Rivers Trust are coordinating a campaign to address this issue and improve water quality to the point where we could swim in our rivers if that took our fancy. Without funds to collect the data to drive this initiative it won’t happen so I urge you to wade in and make a donation as anglers benefit from the improved water quality in several ways – the cleaner bankside, improved flylife, better fishing and healthier access to the water e.g. to land fish without getting infected cuts or other health impacts. If you have any doubts then take a look at your local river on the web portal and see how many hours the CSO upstream of where you fish has been pumping out muck into your river in the last year. Shockingly, the one 5 minutes down the road from my house overflowed 52 times last year for around 1100 hours into the local brook. It is a real eye opener and I am sure will get you opening your wallet as well as reviewing the runoff that you create from your paved surfaces on your property.

Tight Lines

Greg