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Thames Water data reveals raw sewage discharges in rivers rose 50% in 2024 (www.theguardian.com)

submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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A record 50% more raw sewage was discharged into rivers in England by Thames Water last year compared with the previous 12 months, data seen by the Guardian reveals.

Thames, the largest of the privatised water companies, which is teetering on the verge of collapse with debts of £19bn, was responsible for almost 300,000 hours of raw sewage pouring into waterways in 2024 from its ageing sewage works, according to the data. This compares with 196,414 hours of raw effluent dumped in 2023.

The data, obtained by the analyst Peter Hammond in answer to an environmental information request to the company, comes after Thames Water won approval from the court of appeal for a £3bn emergency debt bailout to avoid collapse.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Now I don't want to sound like I'm defending Thames Water (fuck them), but what exactly does 1 hour of raw sewage look like? It feels like a meaningless metric, that doesn't really tell me what the damage Thames Water actually did.

Any amount of raw sewage is bad however:

A garden hose pouring poo in a river is bad.

A 1 meter wide pipe shifting a swimming pools worth a minute into a river is worse.

Or is this trying to tell me that small amounts consistently over a long period of time is worse than a large amount over a short period?

They've made a lot of public water spaces toxic, so I'm going to assume whatever it is, it's on the worse end of the scale.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

As far as I understand it, the only monitoring that they have for the majority of the outlets is a simple logger that shows when an outlet valve is open or closed. In most cases, there is no record of how much is passing through that outlet - just that it was open for X hours. Obviously, they will already know which are the main problem areas, but I doubt that they have detailed records for most of them.

To be honest, even getting to the stage where (almost) all outlets have some kind of monitoring at all is no small achievement - so I wouldn't want to underplay that - and I am aware that installing flow meters to all the outlets would cost a fair bit.

Overall, I would rather they spend the money on stopping the sewage being discharged in the first place, rather than spend too much on measuring exactly how much there is.