Sewage: Pollution

(asked on 26th June 2019) - View Source

Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:

To ask Her Majesty's Government what steps, if any, they are taking to ensure that consumers are notified of having sewage and waste water spillages in their locality.


This question was answered on 10th July 2019

The Environment Agency (EA) operates a daily pollution risk forecasting service via the internet which notifies the public of pollution risks at England’s 421 designated bathing waters, during the bathing season (May-September). This service makes pollution forecasts based on known issues affecting bathing water quality (e.g. periods of heavy rainfall) and includes information of ongoing real-time pollution incidents.

The information the EA provides is also made available to the public by Surfers Against Sewage who include it in their Safer Seas Service application, alongside information on spills from storm overflows that is provided by water companies.

Additionally, the EA is working with water companies on a programme to secure Event Duration Monitoring (EDM) on the vast majority of inland and coastal storm overflows in England by 2020. EDM measures the performance of storm overflows in terms of how often and for how long they spill which allows high risk overflows to be identified prior to evidence of environmental impact. This information is used to inform future improvement programmes for storm overflows.

For storm overflows that discharge to sensitive waters such as to bathing beaches or other inland high amenity areas, we require the water companies to install automated communications telemetry, so that they know in real time when a storm overflow has discharged. Some water companies are extending this real time reporting for the majority of their storm overflows.

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