South Africa’s beaches and rivers are not the only ones suffering from an onslaught of sewage pollution, as warnings were put in place for dozens of beaches in England and Wales after untreated sewage was discharged into the sea around the coast.
The BBC reported last week that official data from the UK’s Southern Water authority showed numerous discharges of sewage since last Monday. Southern Water said that the announcement was made to protect homes and businesses from flooding after excessive rains.
The pollution follows a period of heavy rain across southern England that was experienced after a spell of extremely dry weather due to ongoing heatwaves and subsequent drought.
Warnings from the Safer Seas and Rivers Service are based on water firms’ data. The service is run by a charity, Surfers Against Sewage. Many of the contaminated beaches are popular coastal resort destinations around the areas of West Sussex, Cornwall, Norfolk, Bridgend, Lancashire, Isle of Wight, North Yorkshire, Devon, West Sussex and Essex.
Johnny Palmer, a local landowner affected by the sewage spills, expressed his dissatisfaction with the situation to the BBC, saying that it was “an absolute disgrace that this was even allowed to happen”.
“I think it’s a disgrace. You’ve got children swimming. And you know, you can’t tell your kids to not drink the water. So you’ve literally got children drinking sewage, which is the kind of thing you might expect in parts of Africa or India, but, you know, Western Europe,” he said.
Palmer has been working for years to make the water clean enough to gain bathing water status.
“Rivers are a central part of our landscape, our ecology and our natural environment.
“They are a resource that everyone can and should use – and does use,” Palmer said.
Southern Water is one of the water companies responsible for those regions, along with Wessex Water and South West Water.
Southern Water said that “there were thunderstorms accompanied by heavy rain the night before and on Tuesday. Storm releases were made to protect homes, schools and businesses from flooding. The release is 95–97% rainwater and so should not be described as ‘raw sewage’.”
“We know customers do not like that the industry has to rely on these discharges to protect them, and we are pioneering a new approach.”
British authorities slapped Southern Water with a record £90-million fine last year after the water supplier admitted to deliberately dumping vast amounts of sewage into the sea across the south coast.
Under EU law, these kinds of sewage discharges are legal only in “exceptional” circumstances, such as after heavy rains, when there is a risk that pipes that carry stormwater, along with sewage, may overflow, the article said. However, in 2020 and 2021, the BBC reported that there were almost 400 000 such events.
The Environment Agency said that sewage pollution could be “devastating to human health, local biodiversity and our environment”. It said it would “not hesitate to act to eliminate the harm sewage discharges cause to the environment”.
It has previously called for the top executives of England’s water companies to face jail time when serious incidents of pollution occur.
Hugo Tagholm, chief executive of Surfers Against Sewage, said: “Our rivers and beaches are once again being treated as open sewers. Years of underinvestment are now in plain sight.”
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