Thames Water to pay over £61,000 for sewage leak
The sludge was released into Silchester Brook and Fouldry Brook last year causing up to 22,000 fish to die
THAMES Water has been ordered to pay more than £61,000 after sludge leaked into Silchester Brook in Hampshire and and Foudry Brook in Berkshire last summer, causing thousands of fish to die.
The sludge was released into the brooks in July 2010, affecting a 20km stretch of water and killing between 7,500 and 22,000 fish including chub, brown trout, perch, pike, roach, tench, bullhead and loach.
On July 21, 2010, concerned residents raised the alarm to both the Environment Agency and Thames Water, reporting that sewage was spotted in the water and there was a strong smell of sewage and grey-coloured water in the Silchester Brook.
The Environment Agency conducted an investigation and at Winchester Crown Court yesterday (Thursday) Thames Water Utilities Limited was sentenced and ordered to pay a total of £61,049, including a £29,985 fine, £31,049 in costs to the Environment Agency and a £15 victim surcharge.
The court heard that in an interview under caution, Thames Water had admitted that instead of waiting for a tanker already scheduled to remove the sludge, a Thames Water employee manually opened the valves on the storm tanks and pumped the entire quantity of stored sewage sludge to the inlet of the works. The highly concentrated material completely overwhelmed the system and a thick, sludgy effluent was discharged into the brook.
Environment Agency officers dosed the river with hydrogen peroxide and deployed aeration equipment to maintain oxygen levels but the sewage continued to spread, affecting the total length of Silchester and Foudry brooks through Stratfield, Mortimer, Grazely, Three Mile Cross and Green Park in Reading.
Thames Water stopped discharging from the sewage treatment works and was able to remove some of the pollution from the watercourse with tankers. The company also imported clean effluent from Basingstoke sewage treatment works to dilute the pollution in the watercourse, but the impact of the incident was already catastrophic.
In sentencing the water company, the court took into account the firm's early guilty plea and reduced the fine from £50,000.
Claire Bale, lead investigating officer for the Environment Agency, said afterwards: “We are pleased that the court has recognised the gravity of this incident and hope that this fine will act as an incentive to other operators to ensure they have appropriate procedures in place to better protect their local environment and community.
“We take these types of incidents very seriously and will do everything within our powers to safeguard the environment and people affected, and that includes bringing those who harm the environment to justice.
“We would like to thank those members of the public who reported the pollution to our incident hotline as they enabled us to trace the extent of the brook affected early on, allowing us to prevent the situation from being even worse. We are also grateful to the landowners that assisted us during this incident by granting access to their land and for offers of help.”
For more on this story read next week's Newbury Weekly News.
