by It is strange, indeed, that one of our most beloved lyrical books about English rivers was written in the dying embryo of the Victorian era. When Kenneth Grahame was writing about a rat and a mole passing his days “just messing around in boats” – inspired by the walks he took with his son along the River Thames and its tributaries in Berkshire – the waters of flow past his house and on. to London a cesspool was often blamed for the diseases that swept through the city, characterized at that age as one of filth and sickness.
Perhaps the microbiologist Arthur Hassall, writing about life on the banks of the Thames in 1850: “Some of the inhabitants of the city are made to eat some of their own excrement, in one form or another, and in addition , to pay for the privilege.” You get the feeling that Mr. Hassall would be disappointed if you knew that Mr. Hassall has changed little 174 years later.
About 30 miles downstream from where Grahame wrote Wind in the Willows, four boats will carve a path through those same waters on Saturday, as they battle it out to be the first to reach the finish line at Chiswick Bridge. Of course the eyes of the 18 men and 18 women who will be going through the water will be on that great championship of the Rás na Bád. But they will also be doing their best not to fall in. Why? Because the water is filled with sewage.
It has been a very bad week for Thames Water. The beleaguered company is facing its regulator and finds itself in a race for funding after its investors pulled out of a planned £500 million lifeline, all while claiming that water quality in London and in the South East worse than ever thanks to sewage. overflow from its outlets. That this coincided with one of the highlights of the British sporting calendar, which largely takes place in the manor of Thames Water, only added insult to injury.
Oxford University Boat Club coach Sean Bowden announced that the water quality in Britain’s rivers was a “national disgrace” as the levels of E.coli detected in the Thames reached alarming levels. The Environment Agency (EA) has revealed that a record 3.6 million hours of sewage were dumped into Britain’s rivers last year.
In the Thames, surveys found an average of 2,869 E.coli colony units per 100ml of water (almost three times the recommended limit) in samples taken around Hammersmith Bridge, where Saturday’s boat race will take place. The IS telegraph carried out its own test on Thursday and found that E.coli levels were 20 times higher than the threshold for “adequate” quality swimming water, and almost eight times that for intestinal enterococci, which suggests a strong human effluent presence in the river at Putney at that time. time.
“It’s a concern,” Bowden said Sports telegraph this week. “And I’m very happy that the papers are chasing the water companies in this regard. I am right with them. It’s a national disgrace, isn’t it?”
He said: “Why would you want to send your children out there?”
Well enough, or indeed your cox. The traditional dunk ceremony at the end of the race is likely to be gone. The organizers have put in place new guidelines which highlight “the risks of entering the water”, advising rowers to “cover open wounds”, wash their hands regularly and visit the station cleaning in the finished area.
It is worth noting that the health of the Thames does not just depend on sewage spills. Fertilizer, pesticide and faecal material runoff from the land – so-called “diffuse agricultural pollution” – are also worrisome. According to local supply company South East Water, pesticide concentrations in the Lower Thames area have recently exceeded Drinking Water Standards (DWS), with high concentrations of the herbicides flufenacet and propylamide found in the water. These readings were probably exacerbated by heavy rain.
However, it is the sewage that is currently drawing attention to the nation. EA data shows that between 2022 and 2023 the number of hours of sewage spilled by Thames Water increased by more than 160 per cent, with 196,414 hours of spills recorded last year.
Figures obtained by the Liberal Democrats in November 2023 showed that Thames Water had spilled the equivalent of 29,000 Olympic swimming pools since 2020. Companies such as Thames Water say overflows are necessary in extreme circumstances (for example during periods of extreme rainfall heavy) to manage the water flow. effluent through our aging sewage systems. The argument was, wouldn’t you rather release sewage into our waterways in a controlled manner than back into your house? Campaigners actually say they use overflow exhaust much more often.
Thames Water was fined £35.7 million between 2017 and 2023 for pollution incidents. In 2023, he was fined £3.3 million for killing more than 1,400 fish by releasing untreated sewage into rivers.
In Britain, water companies have a shameful record in dealing with spills, but Thames Water has come under particular scrutiny in the past month. He addressed their commitment (or lack thereof) to tackling sewage issues, and refused to join an industry-wide push to reduce pollution in our rivers. The Government announced that six water companies would spend £180 million over the course of a year to prevent more than 8,000 spills; Thames Water will not be among those participating.
An examination of Thames Water’s own live sewage map is alarming. As we head into this Easter weekend, it’s been a sea of red dots, each alerting you to an impending storm, while the amber ones tell you where there’s been a recent downpour. Click on Thame, for example, a market town east of Oxford. “Our monitor indicated that this storm is currently overflowing. This means there could be sewage in this part of the watercourse.” What does it include? Cheek Stream. Any wild swimmers may want to avoid that particular spot over the bank holiday weekend.
Or how about Greenwich, in the heart of the capital? At 14:52 on Friday, the storm outlet has been releasing for 44 hours 22 minutes and counting. It’s a slightly better story for the Boat Race – the nearest spillway down the river is at Wandsworth, and that was a short five-hour job. Although it is worth noting that there was quite a large spill upriver at Mogden this week too. That one went on for 15 hours, well into the early hours of Friday morning. The stream is expected to hit Essex on Saturday afternoon.
Mogden plays a central role in the great Thames Water debate. The sewage treatment works in west London collapsed in 2021, flooding nearby houses and gardens with dirty water. “The river came up very fast. He grabbed the bottom of our garden and ran up into the kitchen. It smelled strongly of sewage,” said local resident, Anna King.
It is one of the largest works in the UK, treating waste water from more than 2 million people. The previous year, during a period of heavy rain, around 2 billion liters of raw sewage was released in just 48 hours. The company now has plans to use the plant as a so-called recycling scheme, which would see 100 million liters of water taken from the river every day and 100 million liters of treated sewage returned.
A Thames Water spokesman said: “Acting to improve the health of rivers is a key focus for us and we want to be at the forefront with our transparent approach to data. We are still the only company to provide live alerts for all untreated releases and this ‘near real time’ data is available to customers as a map on our website.”
They added that “long-term above-average rainfall has fallen across London and the Thames Valley with groundwater levels unusually high for this time of year”.
“We are working hard to make these spills unnecessary and have published plans to upgrade more than 250 of our sites.”
The Tideway Tunnel, a 24ft wide tunnel running from Acton to Stratford, which is nearing completion, is meant to take some of the pressure off. When it is open, its purpose is to prevent discharge into the river from more than 30 out of 50 outlets. “London has forgotten the Thames,” said Tideway Tunnel chief executive Andy Mitchell The Telegraph in 2018. “Personally, I think it’s unacceptable that our capital would be treated like an open sewer and that needs to change.”
Called the Super Sewer, it will be a kind of second Thames – a new system to support the Victorian pipes designed by Sir Joseph Bazalgette. In the 1860s, those pipes were meant to serve a city of two million. Nine million live in the capital now. That’s more than four times the volume of the effluent. When it rains and the sewers flood, the excess is flushed into the river through a network of overflows.
The Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race teams might want to pray for fair weather on Saturday morning, then, if for no other reason than the winning cox might not appreciate a celebratory dunk in a sewage spill .
