Budleigh Sewage action

One of the latest claims made by South West Water, is that they now monitor all of their Sewage Overflow points (also known as CSOs), and that they publish the sewage discharge data on each of these CSOs, at the end of the year.

Sounds good? Transparent?

As with many claims made by SWW (and other water companies), many real issues are hidden in what they do NOT say.

Like the fact that there are another 7,000 sewage outfalls in the UK, called Emergency Overflows (or EOs), 90% of which are not monitored at all. These overflow pipes are mostly next to sewage pumping stations, and are meant to allow emergency discharges in the event of critical failure of that sewage pumping station. This should be exceptionally rare.

However, of the 10% of EOs which are monitored (because they discharge into shellfish waters), untreated sewage was dumped from more than a third of these emergency overflows in 2022, and 60 per cent of those released sewage on multiple occasions.

So what’s that got to do with Budleigh Salterton?

We have just discovered that there is one of these Emergency Overflows coming out of the Lime Kiln Sewage Pumping Station – and it has dumped a pretty unsavoury load into the Kersbrook, and from there directly onto Budleigh beach. The outfall from this is also connected to the new Otter Estuary National Nature Reserve.

So does it matter if there’s an Emergency Overflow in that location, if it’s not meant to actually dump sewage?

We can only go by what we can see, and that’s pretty shocking!

The picture below is fairly typical of what we are seeing. This appears clear evidence that this outfall has been used to discharge untreated sewage, along with sanitary pads and PPE. Warning – graphic content!

So what can we do about this?

Firstly, we’ve submitted an Information Request to South West Water (the owners and operators of this SPS), as well as the Environment Agency (who are charged with policing the operators). We’ve asked them a number of questions, including how many times it has been used in the last two years, for how long, and why (remember, EOs can only be used if there is a critical failure of the pumping station).

We are still waiting for a response on that, so we’ve also submitted a Sewage Pollution Incident report to both SWW and the Environment Agency, including a full set of photos and video evidence. So far (5 days) we have not even received an acknowledgement, so we are following up to request a full investigation.

We feel it is totally unacceptable to have an overflow that can dump raw, unfiltered sewage and sanitary pads – unmonitored – into a water channel on the edge of our National Nature Reserve and onto our beach. So let South West Water, and your MP, know what you think!