The sight and smell of raw human sewage polluting the River Waveney brought protestors out onto the streets on Saturday.
The public stink about the presence of human excrement first occurred in November. It was a House of Lords amendment to the Environment Bill placing tighter strictures on water companies which continued the practice of allowing raw sewage to be pumped into rivers.
But the government backed an amendment of its own with weaker wording, to the fury of the opposition and of clean environment campaigners.
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Protests after claims of ‘turning a blind eye’
There were immediate protests around the country, and in particular in Suffolk and Norfolk. Protestors who had already organised against the MP for South Norfolk, Richard Bacon, took up the argument, since Mr Bacon declined to vote against the government’s plan. Posters criticising him were distributed around his constituency.
But protests against raw sewage dumped into water courses have also taken place in place in Eye and Kings Lynn. Diss residents held their first demonstration during December.
Since then, two stories have emphasised the problem. The first was a report from Parliament’s Environment Audit Committee earlier this month. It claimed every river in England is polluted with a ‘chemical cocktail’.
“Poor water quality in English rivers is a result of chronic underinvestment and multiple failures in monitoring, governance and enforcement,” the committee warned.
Only 14 percent of English rivers meet good ecological status, with pollution from agriculture, sewage, roads and single-use plastics contributing to a dangerous ‘chemical cocktail’, poisoning our waterways. Not a single river in England has received a clean bill of health for chemical contamination.
The committee was told of a lack of political will to improve water quality, with successive governments, water companies and regulators seemingly turning a blind eye to antiquated practices of dumping sewage and other pollutants in rivers.
Instructions not to investigate ‘low impact’ pollution
The second story to bring the problem to the public’s notice was the leak of internal Environment Agency memos which revealed instructions to staff not to investigate ‘low impact’ pollution incidents. According to a report in the Guardian:
“’Should staff hear of a category 3 or 4 incident that does not relate to a water company or a regulated site’, they are told: ‘Do not substantiate report, call site or add any details. Shut down report.’ Template reply letters have been created for agency staff in anticipation of complaints.
“One Environment Agency officer, who did not wish to be named because staff have been warned against speaking to the media, said: ‘A lot of category 2 incidents start off as 3s until they are attended’ and that an example of a category 3 could be a ‘2km spill of oil or sewage in a river’.”
This week’s local anger was stirred by reports that there was a disgusting smell and the presence of human excreta pumped from the outfall pipe on the Waveney in Diss, directly behind and obnoxiously noticeable from a supermarket. A local kayak group reported seeing human excreta whilst using the river.
Canvassers claimed that, downwind during the past week, the smell of the sewage was noticeable across half the town.
The outfalls of sewage are supposed to be permitted in certain limited circumstances, specifically after heavy rainfall when the ancient sewage system can’t cope and there would be a danger of the sewage flooding back into homes.
But it has been an unusually dry January, with no heavy rainfall for weeks.
