Been swimming in Langstone Harbour recently?

[oldharry]

Its all very well yelling at the MPs who voted against the amendment, but they know we are the inheritors of a Victorian sewage disposal system that their predecessors from both sides of the house have not just ignored, but have frequently actively perpetuated. That in spite of the fact that the system has become more and more overloaded.

Sewage has been discharged into the sea all along the coast for centuries. Sewage contaminated Oysters from Emsworth killed the Bishop of Winchester and many other VIP's after a banquet in 1905 for example. Even as recently as the mid 1990's there were notices warning people of severely contaminated water in Dell Quay from the Apuldram Sewage works. The water quality HAS improved significantly there, but nowhere near enough. When I first moored there in 1991 a brown faecal scum came down on every ebb. When as a kid in the 1950's I was learning how not to fall out of my boat or tip it up. A very powerful incentive to stay dry was the fact that the local hospital would give you a stomach pump as a matter of course if you had had to be rescued from the water, because the levels of pollution were so bad.

We boatowners are not guiltless either. Only recently have we started fitting holding tanks to our boats. The boat I chartered for my Honeymoon 50 years ago emptied directly into the sea via the ingenious complexities of a Baby Blake. Many still do. Nowadays it can be tidily pumped out at the marina, with not a drop spilt, directly and safely into the sewage system. Then on into the sea....

The MP for Chichester, Gill Keegan has received a huge amount of flack from local voters for voting against the amendment. But she is not stupid, She knows how much worse it would be when the sewage backs up to flood into our houses and streets, because there is nowhere else for it to go! She is no happier than the rest of us that the infrastructure is not there to facilitate the amendment she voted against.

The amendment is nothing more than an unthinking gut reaction to an issue that will need £billions investment before we can solve it.

Stop the discharge today, and you there will soon be a whole lot more than a gut reaction... MPs know that, and Keegan at least claims to be proactively working towards viable solutions.

In the meantime, if you dont want your effluent to go out to sea, stop using the toilet, shower, dishwasher etc. Either that or stop the sea discharge and get your own back. Literally. That is the reality.

Its a disgusting situation whichever way, and the Water Companies are firmly to blame for failing to rectify matters 50 years ago, when they were still actually building sea sewage outfalls. It was a far greater problem 60 years ago when I was a youngster watching with interest the pipes being laid across our holiday beach! 'Its OK, its a mile out to sea. It wont spoil the beach' I was told.

What is of far greater concern is the housing developments proposed around the Chichester/Langston Harbour areas, which without the sewage disposal infrastructure will simply compound the problem. Keegan knows this full well.

But who wants new sewage treament facilities anywhere near their homes? Not the developers, who want to be able to sell. Not you nor me....

We can not simply shut the sea discharge valves, and the campaign to do so simply fails to recognise a problem that has been building up for centuries.

 

[Stemar]

It's really not; the turds still end up in the Clyde when the rain fall is above a certain limit, which is the subject of the thread. If they charged the same and the turds didn't end up floating past the Cloch you might have a point.

On the S coast, it seems that the turds are running the water companies

We can not simply shut the sea discharge valves, and the campaign to do so simply fails to recognise a problem that has been building up for centuries.

Agreed. We're muddling through with what is at base, a 150 year old system, designed for 1/3 the population, but we can make the companies invest in a decent system. It will need substantial government investment too, because it's simply too big for the individual water companies, but no profits should be declared until it's done

 

[Blueboatman]

Parliament only got to grips with building an effective , sealed , London sewer system ( Bazelgette et al ) when the great summer stench of the Thames made the Houses of Parliament untenable
Go figure
THATS how things get moved up the agenda ?

 

[Never Grumble]

Its all very well yelling at the MPs who voted against the amendment, but they know we are the inheritors of a Victorian sewage disposal system that their predecessors from both sides of the house have not just ignored, but have frequently actively perpetuated. That in spite of the fact that the system has become more and more overloaded.

Sewage has been discharged into the sea all along the coast for centuries. Sewage contaminated Oysters from Emsworth killed the Bishop of Winchester and many other VIP's after a banquet in 1905 for example. Even as recently as the mid 1990's there were notices warning people of severely contaminated water in Dell Quay from the Apuldram Sewage works. The water quality HAS improved significantly there, but nowhere near enough. When I first moored there in 1991 a brown faecal scum came down on every ebb. When as a kid in the 1950's I was learning how not to fall out of my boat or tip it up. A very powerful incentive to stay dry was the fact that the local hospital would give you a stomach pump as a matter of course if you had had to be rescued from the water, because the levels of pollution were so bad.

We boatowners are not guiltless either. Only recently have we started fitting holding tanks to our boats. The boat I chartered for my Honeymoon 50 years ago emptied directly into the sea via the ingenious complexities of a Baby Blake. Many still do. Nowadays it can be tidily pumped out at the marina, with not a drop spilt, directly and safely into the sewage system. Then on into the sea....

The MP for Chichester, Gill Keegan has received a huge amount of flack from local voters for voting against the amendment. But she is not stupid, She knows how much worse it would be when the sewage backs up to flood into our houses and streets, because there is nowhere else for it to go! She is no happier than the rest of us that the infrastructure is not there to facilitate the amendment she voted against.

The amendment is nothing more than an unthinking gut reaction to an issue that will need £billions investment before we can solve it.

Stop the discharge today, and you there will soon be a whole lot more than a gut reaction... MPs know that, and Keegan at least claims to be proactively working towards viable solutions.

In the meantime, if you dont want your effluent to go out to sea, stop using the toilet, shower, dishwasher etc. Either that or stop the sea discharge and get your own back. Literally. That is the reality.

Its a disgusting situation whichever way, and the Water Companies are firmly to blame for failing to rectify matters 50 years ago, when they were still actually building sea sewage outfalls. It was a far greater problem 60 years ago when I was a youngster watching with interest the pipes being laid across our holiday beach! 'Its OK, its a mile out to sea. It wont spoil the beach' I was told.

What is of far greater concern is the housing developments proposed around the Chichester/Langston Harbour areas, which without the sewage disposal infrastructure will simply compound the problem. Keegan knows this full well.

But who wants new sewage treament facilities anywhere near their homes? Not the developers, who want to be able to sell. Not you nor me....

We can not simply shut the sea discharge valves, and the campaign to do so simply fails to recognise a problem that has been building up for centuries.

The issue coming home to roost is that these companies have stuffed their pockets full of cash (billions of pounds) for a number of years at the same time ignoring the need to make proper infrastructure improvements that would future proof the system. Yes just lets leave it another 25 years do a bit of monitoring, it'll be OK is no solution. The harbours are full of sh*t already the politicians need to get a grip and do something now rather than kick the can down the road. All the local politicians talk a good game until properly challenged.

Just because it happened in the 1950s when you were a kid doesn't make it acceptable now, the world has apparently moved on for the better, at least in some respects. I didn't need a stomach pump having swam off the back of my boat in Chichester harbour last year I spent four days when I was supposed to be on holiday worrying about where the next toilets were and with serious stomach cramps. As they say sh*t happens but I'm afraid it shouldn't.

 

[oldharry]

I never said, or believed it was acceptable. What I did say was, it was accepted - except when, like you the all too short summer holiday was ruined by the consequences.

 

[AntarcticPilot]

Its all very well yelling at the MPs who voted against the amendment, but they know we are the inheritors of a Victorian sewage disposal system that their predecessors from both sides of the house have not just ignored, but have frequently actively perpetuated. That in spite of the fact that the system has become more and more overloaded.

Sewage has been discharged into the sea all along the coast for centuries. Sewage contaminated Oysters from Emsworth killed the Bishop of Winchester and many other VIP's after a banquet in 1905 for example. Even as recently as the mid 1990's there were notices warning people of severely contaminated water in Dell Quay from the Apuldram Sewage works. The water quality HAS improved significantly there, but nowhere near enough. When I first moored there in 1991 a brown faecal scum came down on every ebb. When as a kid in the 1950's I was learning how not to fall out of my boat or tip it up. A very powerful incentive to stay dry was the fact that the local hospital would give you a stomach pump as a matter of course if you had had to be rescued from the water, because the levels of pollution were so bad.

We boatowners are not guiltless either. Only recently have we started fitting holding tanks to our boats. The boat I chartered for my Honeymoon 50 years ago emptied directly into the sea via the ingenious complexities of a Baby Blake. Many still do. Nowadays it can be tidily pumped out at the marina, with not a drop spilt, directly and safely into the sewage system. Then on into the sea....

The MP for Chichester, Gill Keegan has received a huge amount of flack from local voters for voting against the amendment. But she is not stupid, She knows how much worse it would be when the sewage backs up to flood into our houses and streets, because there is nowhere else for it to go! She is no happier than the rest of us that the infrastructure is not there to facilitate the amendment she voted against.

The amendment is nothing more than an unthinking gut reaction to an issue that will need £billions investment before we can solve it.

Stop the discharge today, and you there will soon be a whole lot more than a gut reaction... MPs know that, and Keegan at least claims to be proactively working towards viable solutions.

In the meantime, if you dont want your effluent to go out to sea, stop using the toilet, shower, dishwasher etc. Either that or stop the sea discharge and get your own back. Literally. That is the reality.

Its a disgusting situation whichever way, and the Water Companies are firmly to blame for failing to rectify matters 50 years ago, when they were still actually building sea sewage outfalls. It was a far greater problem 60 years ago when I was a youngster watching with interest the pipes being laid across our holiday beach! 'Its OK, its a mile out to sea. It wont spoil the beach' I was told.

What is of far greater concern is the housing developments proposed around the Chichester/Langston Harbour areas, which without the sewage disposal infrastructure will simply compound the problem. Keegan knows this full well.

But who wants new sewage treament facilities anywhere near their homes? Not the developers, who want to be able to sell. Not you nor me....

We can not simply shut the sea discharge valves, and the campaign to do so simply fails to recognise a problem that has been building up for centuries.

Rivers in general are FAR cleaner than they were when I was a lad. The River Calder in Dewsbury (where I grew up) was so polluted with industrial waste from the die-makers and woolen industry that nothing could live in it; if you went in the water it was, as @oldharry says, an automatic visit to A&E for stomach pumping and probably treatment for skin burns! The river was often covered with detergent foam and brightly coloured scum. And yet, my father was a founder member of a sailing club on that very same river, and I remember helping to dig out the slope for a launching slip, though I don't recall the club ever getting properly off the ground. That would have been mid-60s. And in the early 70s, if you went in the Cam at Cambridge, you were strongly advised to keep your mouth shut!

Unfortunately, in the former case part of the solution was the demise of the heavy woolen industry, but pollution at those levels would not be tolerated these days.

Does no one remember the massive campaigns of the 80s and 90s to clean up beaches? Before then, most swimming beaches in the UK were heavily polluted; they didn't meet even the lowest standards set by other countries.

Things HAVE improved, and at least part of the problem is a systematic one - rain water and foul water use the same drains in most places. So if there's heavy rainfall, it has to go somewhere. Modern estates are, I think, built with separate ground and foul drainage systems - they are round my way, any way, as there's an existing drainage system for rain water - we'd be living in a swamp if there wasn't! But in areas that don't depend on drainage of surface water, the separation isn't maintained at the main sewer level. Heavy rain overwhelms the system. The only real solution is to separate rainwater and foul water systems entirely - rainwater doesn't need anything like the same amount of treatment as foul water, and could go through a simpler, higher-throughput system if it weren't mixed with toilet waste. But the lack of separation is at the major infrastructure level, so it would be a monumental task to do it. Either you have to build water treatment plants that can treat massively more foul water than necessary, or you rip up the entire main sewer network and separate rainwater and foul water. The former has the problem that filter beds aren't something you can switch on and off- they are biological systems and need to be in continuous use or they die,. The latter would mean pretty much every road in every town being torn up and the sewers duplcated.

To fix the problem would mean a massive expenditure. I'm not saying it shouldn't happen, and I agree with those who suggest that water companies should be non-profit, with all dividends that would have been paid to shareholders ploughed back into the infrastructure. But it isn't something that can happen quickly or be pain-free.

 

[oldharry]

Another issue is that the more ground we cover with concrete, tarmac housing etc the more run off has to becollected and disposed of. In round figures 10mm of rain will produce 10 litres per square meter. If that is drained off into the sewers as it is now, rather than allowed to soak in to bare ground, thats a massive amount of water to be disposed of. This why there vis so much more severe flooding nowadays, if the drains cant cope then it has to go somewhere. And dont get me started on builders who knowingly build on flood plains, which are the way nature copes with excess rainfall safely, and the total misery and loss to the new owners when nature does it what it has always done.

 

[Bajansailor]

I had a nice summer job in 1989 driving a tug for a Dutch dredging company working off Langstone Harbour - they were digging a trench (about 4 or 5 miles long) for a 'long sea outfall' pipe that would take the sewage a bit further out before letting it loose.
And the cost of this project was many millions, even 32 years ago.
It seemed to be a vast amount of money to simply discharge the sewage a few miles further out to sea.
I remember often driving through a river of pure sewage that would be released on the ebb tide at the entrance to Langstone Harbour - occasionally somebody would screw up on their tide times, and open the pipe as the tide was flooding into the harbour.....
The marine biologist in the film clip noted that marine life, sea birds et al will all be affected by the toxins that accompany this sewage - I remember hundreds of seagulls feeding when the pipe off the harbour entrance was opened.
But as Old Harry say re the drone video in the OP's link, this must still be better than the sewage backing up and flowing out on to the streets of all the communities in the area. Not good, but it looks like they currently have no other option (apart from spending lots of money on new infrastructure, but why would Boris' mob care about this?)

 

[Blueboatman]

Another issue is that the more ground we cover with concrete, tarmac housing etc the more run off has to becollected and disposed of. In round figures 10mm of rain will produce 10 litres per square meter. If that is drained off into the sewers as it is now, rather than allowed to soak in to bare ground, thats a massive amount of water to be disposed of. This why there vis so much more severe flooding nowadays, if the drains cant cope then it has to go somewhere. And dont get me started on builders who knowingly build on flood plains, which are the way nature copes with excess rainfall safely, and the total misery and loss to the new owners when nature does it what it has always done.

Indeed
Eg On the east side of Chichester for example
Soggy soggy land , drainage rerouting , fields and fields full of new curb appeal housing , all plumbed onto .. the existing drains

Crackers Squared ?

 

[Poignard]

Another issue is that the more ground we cover with concrete, tarmac housing etc the more run off has to becollected and disposed of. In round figures 10mm of rain will produce 10 litres per square meter. If that is drained off into the sewers as it is now, rather than allowed to soak in to bare ground, thats a massive amount of water to be disposed of. This why there vis so much more severe flooding nowadays, if the drains cant cope then it has to go somewhere. And dont get me started on builders who knowingly build on flood plains, which are the way nature copes with excess rainfall safely, and the total misery and loss to the new owners when nature does it what it has always done.

I'm sure you're right about that.

In the London suburb where I live there is hardly a front garden that has not been paved over or concreted and turned into a carpark (mine included). The torential rain we had one night last week overwhelmed the drainage system in the road, and the soakaway under my 'carpark'.

 

[Kelpie]

I don't know when it was brought in but current building regulations do require separation of rain and foul water. Rain water must be dealt with using "SUDS" and in urban areas you must make provision for soakaways to drain it away. This is to compensate for the area covered in concrete, tarmac, etc.

 

[Stemar]

It wouldn't be an instant solution, but there are surfaces suitable for footways, parking, etc. that are porous - a porous asphalt, brick pavers and the like. A thou shalt use porous stuff for thy carparks, pavements and drives regulation would be a start "Argh no - it'll cost more" I hear from all sides. Maybe, but it'll cost less than a foot of water in your living room.

 

[AntarcticPilot]

It wouldn't be an instant solution, but there are surfaces suitable for footways, parking, etc. that are porous - a porous asphalt, brick pavers and the like. A thou shalt use porous stuff for thy carparks, pavements and drives regulation would be a start "Argh no - it'll cost more" I hear from all sides. Maybe, but it'll cost less than a foot of water in your living room.

Fine for new builds, but impossible to enforce for private gardens. You don't need planning permission to concrete over a front garden.

 

[penfold]

A baffling omission from the various changes wreaked upon planning by either 'getting rid of red tape' from the coalition govt or the more recent meddling by the current lot; given all the carrot offered a small amount of stick would have been quite reasonable and entirely compatible with the implied environmental sentiment.

Fine for new builds, but impossible to enforce for private gardens. You don't need planning permission to concrete over a front garden.

 

[Blueboatman]

We should ( or could, choice!) be adding water butts to delay runoff from sudden downpours

Green roofs , porous drives, it’s not rocket science

Here’s the BEST BIT. If you physically disconnect a loo from the mains inlet and contrive to flush from saved rainwater
1. You save money
2. You relieve load on the system
3. You provide LESS profits for water cos to pay dividends ? !
?Every little helps ?
( I do know that southern water has managed to raise and invest enormous sums in water treatment eg above Brighton marina , further along at Newhaven, other places too and in looking at the drone video for langstone it looks like sewage treatment plant A has morphed into an enormous Plant B
But it ain’t enuff )
And in lots of old urban sewage systems the separation of runoff from grey and black water is leaky at best , hence we are pouring the stuff into the rivers and coastal harbours . Still .

 

[lustyd]

Fine for new builds, but impossible to enforce for private gardens. You don't need planning permission to concrete over a front garden.

If it's over 6 square metres you do.

 

[Black Sheep]

Fine for new builds, but impossible to enforce for private gardens. You don't need planning permission to concrete over a front garden.

I can't face digging out the actual legislation, but Do I Need Planning Permission? suggests that there are restrictions to what you can do under Permitted Development (PD):

Class F of the GPDO refers to the provision of hard surfaces, such as parking areas.

These are permitted under PD providing that:

• any hard surface situated between the principal elevation of a dwelling and the highway, or any surface which would exceed 5m², is made of porous materials
• provision is made to direct run-off water from the surface into a permeable/porous area within the property curtilage and not onto the highway.

 

[Aardee]

smelly was it?
Drone captures sewage pumped into sea for days

I didn't really enjoy it...I was just going through the motions

 

[Black Sheep]

There's no deckchairs in Langstone... but an awful lot of stools

 

[doris]

Back in the nineties the chairman of Southern Water had a Sigma 41 called Sunbeat. I knew him reasonable well and chatted about the whole privatisation issue.

Under public ownership the whole industry was like British Leyland and unbelievably badly managed. Yes I know lots of you will say, 'He would say that', but the experience of public sector management does rather prove the point. Eg DVLA and HMRC plus plenty others at the current time.

[Content removed]

Drainage is just one problem. Motorways, bridges, flyovers, the national grid, broadband etc etc. but we have to have ever increasing standards of living and comfort without paying a true cost.
Just wait until the penny finally drops on the pension demographics.