Sewage plagues every river in London, but there are clusters of Combined Sewer Overflows that need our attention. We’ve created a Google Map with the first areas we can target.
Thames Water must tell people when these overflow in real-time. To make them do this click on the location you want to see live alerts and go through to the email text to copy and paste. We want people to send the water company emails for every hour it is raining.
Cuts to public notifications:
In a month it seems the Environment Agency plans to end its public notifications for the most serious river pollution events in London north of the Thames (and Hertfordshire). This is a worrying development. The service only started after great public pressure in the wake of a large oil slick that polluted the River Lea in 2018. The response from the authorities was poor, and more could have been done to reduce the damage the incident caused. There was no effective,
co-ordinated communication which saw people hunting for scraps of information on social media.
Boaters, businesses, people that live near the river, and organisations banded together to call for a much better response to pollution. The notification service was one outcome. It was extended beyond the Lea to the operational area of the Environment Agency in north London. This was a great outcome. The alerts must continue.
A couple of weeks ago there was a significant sewage overflow event at Mogden Sewage Works near Twickenham. The EA provided notifications. We were able to use them to support people who had been affected by the event and bolster the efforts of the local MP.
Please sign up to these notifications here. Of course there should be alerts for all the Environment Agency’s operational areas. If the service is cut we think this will be a breach of the Environmental Information Regulations – removing public access to information is a roll back.
We have asked the Environment Agency to clarify the situation – it might turn out to be a typo, and the date should have read 2029…we will see.