Because water providers are neglecting to notify hundreds of sewage breaches, swimmers at beach resorts may be unknowingly endangering their health.
Event duration monitors are electrical devices that measure how much raw trash is dumped into oceans and rivers after a major downpour.
These monitors are a crucial instrument that, according to the government, will be used to address the crisis of sewage being deposited in popular tourist and bathing areas.
The Liberal Democrats’ review of Environment Agency data, however, reveals that a number of water companies either didn’t install any monitoring at all or placed monitors that were defective and just 10% effective.
The well-known destinations without monitors are Long Rock in Cornwall, Littlehampton in West Sussex, and Lee-on-the-Solent in Hampshire. Concerns about the health dangers of swimming were raised at Seaford, East Sussex, where the sewage monitor was barely operational a third of the time.
In the whole nation, 1,802 monitors did not function for at least 90% of the time, and 1,717 overflows had no monitors.
In sum, one out of every four spills last year remained unreported.
The firm with the poorest track record was Anglian Water, where 50% of sewage discharges were either not monitored because of malfunctioning monitors or were not measured at all. Severn Water (30%) and South West Water were the next two (29 per cent).
Requests for response from the companies were not answered.
The failure of these water firms to install sewage monitors may constitute gross negligence, according to Lib Dem rural affairs spokesperson Tim Farron. A national scandal has broken out.
To prevent flooding after heavy rain, storm overflows are built to discharge extra water from the system into nearby rivers or the ocean. Water providers should only do this in well defined circumstances.
The government’s strategy to address sewage spills will soon be published, according to water minister Steve Double. We have made it quite clear that water providers’ dependence on overflows is unacceptable, and they urgently need to drastically cut the amount of sewage they release, he said.
According to preliminary data from Ofwat, water firms lost more over one trillion litres of water to leaks last year. According to the regulator, there are daily losses of almost 2,923 million litres, or 1.06 trillion litres annually.