A single Surrey river and its tributaries has already had more than 4,500 hours of raw untreated sewage dumped into it by Thames Water this year, according to a campaign group.
The River Mole River Watch (RMRW) , which is calling for clean water for the health of wildlife and people, tracks sewage outflows and storm discharges by the utility giant and said that February “saw the highest recorded duration of storm overflows of any month we have been testing so far”.
The group said the February figures easily topped the 2,115 hours from January with the majority of the damage coming from the nine big sewage treatment plants. Both Thames Water, which maintains over 68,000 miles of sewers, and manages 354 sewage treatment works, and RMRW said the pollution was more diluted than normal due to the heavy rain. Thames Water has also said it is carrying out improvement work across its network.
I was about to make a comment about Americans using any unit besides metric and then see that this is a British story. So how much is 4,500 hours, especially without knowing flow rate? Is it a trickle, is it like a dam. That’s a really weird unit to use.
I don’t think that the monitoring eqpt includes any kind of flow rate detection. I’d guess that it is basically just an indication of when a valve is closed or open. To be fair, flow rate monitoring eqpt would be a LOT more expensive to install at all of the outflow points.
You can see the live map from Thames Water here, and looking at their FAQs:
“We can’t tell you if it was a trickle or a deluge, only that it happened”. Should I be less bothered by that statement because additional monitoring is “too expensive”? (Rhetorical since I know you are just posting the article and bringing light to it!)
Well, you know damn well that they would pass the cost on to their users - or go cap in hand to the government and so get it added to taxes - and personally, I’d rather they spent it on preventing it at all rather than just measuring it.