Kentish Express Ashford & District
‘IT NEVER FAILS TO DISGUST ME’
Sian Pettman from the
Friends of
Kingsmead
Field group in
Canterbury, which regularly carries out its own river cleans, says the treatment of the Stour “never fails to disgust me”.
“We abuse it from every angle,” she said. “Beneath the rippled surface, the river bed is all too often riddled with rubbish and the deceptively clear water is contaminated by pollutants.
“We abstract large quantities of groundwater for domestic and industrial use, substantially reducing the flow of water in the river.
“We build on the floodplains and prevent the river from pursuing its natural course.
“We pump thousands of gallons of sewage and foul water into the river each year, often untreated.
“We allow road run-off, contaminated by oil spills and the toxins from the tyres of cars, buses and lorries, to drain straight into it.
“We permit agricultural
slurry, full of pesticides and herbicides, to seep into the river unobserved.
“Groups of youths that catapult the wildlife on the river often go unchecked.
“And if all that is not bad enough, we throw thousands of tons of plastic, metal, glass and other rubbish into the river each year.
“It’s hard to believe that the River Stour is one of only 215 chalk streams in the world, making it a globally rare ecosystem and a unique habitat for wildlife and plants, and yet we treat it so appallingly. I despair.”
Last month, Mrs Pettman and fellow group member Beverley Paton pulled out a pile of rubbish from the small branch of the river that runs alongside Kingsmead Field.
Among the detritus was 15 large sheets of plastic, 10 plastic bottles, nine glass bottles, 14 cans, a plastic umbrella stand, a piece of MDF and several sharp, rusty objects.
She added: “What is particularly depressing is that we had cleaned the same stretch of river a couple of weeks previously, so this rubbish was all new.”