‘Super sewer’ not big enough to prevent all Thames spills

A PLANNED “super sewer” would need to be twice as big to stop waste spilling into Thames, a water chief has said.

Sarah Bentley, the chief executive of Thames Water, admitted to MPS that her company’s performance was “unacceptable” as it continues to dump millions of tons of raw sewage in the river each year.

The £4.9billion tunnel, the width of three double-decker buses, will cut the volume of untreated sewage mixed with rainwater entering the river from almost 40million tons to 2.5million, but will not reduce it entirely, she told the environmental audit committee.

Water companies dumped untreated sewage into rivers in England 400,000 times last year, Environment Agency figures show, as sewers that combine rainwater and waste overflowed and contaminated the environment.

Not one of Britain’s rivers passes cleanliness tests, with sewage pollution from water companies at least partly responsible for the contamination of half of them, with agricultural pollution the other major cause.

“Currently, when we get inundated with rain, up to 39million tons of rainwater, which then gets contaminated with sewage, is discharged into the tidal Thames, which is clearly unacceptable,” she said. “The Thames Tideway tunnel will eliminate the vast majority of that.

“Clearly, with extreme weather events, that are increasing, we need to look at that before it comes into operation in the next two and a half years.

“But when the original analysis was done 15 years ago, we would

‘When the original analysis was done 15 years ago, we would have needed a tunnel twice as big’

have needed a tunnel twice as big.”

Many of the company’s sites were “struggling” to treat enough sewage to meet their legal requirements, she admitted.

Deliberate sewage dumps by another company, Southern Water, between 2010 and 2015, led to it being fined a record £90 million this year.

Ian Mcaulay, its chief executive, told the committee that he was “angry” when he learnt about the incidents upon joining the company in 2017.

“To this day I cannot truly explain. They stood to make no financial gain. There was a strange almost ‘gaming’type approach with a small number of people,” he said.