Budleigh Sewage action

“If we can measure it, we can fix it”. That’s the principle behind the focus on monitoring every single sewage overflow (known as Combined Sewage Overflows, or CSOs) in the country. South West Water have trumpeted their recent ‘success’ on this, and now say they are monitoring 100% of these overflows.

In Budleigh, we have five CSO’s which can discharge sewage into either Knowle Brook running along our high street, or into the Kersbrook, and from there into the sea.

The most polluting Sewage Overflow we have – by some margin – is the one which discharges from the Lime Kiln Sewage Pumping Station (the red brick building next to the children’s playground). This discharges its sewage into the sea on the Otter Ledge.

In 2022 , the last year that SWW have released data for (and a very dry year), this spilled sewage 31 times, for a total duration of 270 hours.

However, something appears to have gone dramatically wrong with this Sewage Pumping station, since the start of 2024.

Firstly, for several weeks in early January, we had lines of tankers pumping sewage out of the overflow tank at this site. The reason (eventually) given, was that ground water seemed to be leaking into the tank, even when there was little rain, and that was causing it to fill up too quickly.

Since this pumping station is responsible for pumping all of Budleigh’s sewage up through a 7km rising main, and up to Maer Lane sewage treatment works in Exmouth, it was never made clear why tankers were required instead of using the pipe which is there for exactly that purpose.

Since then, the overflow monitoring system at the pumping station has registered hundreds of sewage alerts, mostly appear to be just for a few minutes – but it’s unclear what these are, and whether there is a real sewage discharge issue at this site. To help SWW, we’ve provided a large number of screenshots from their own WaterFit application, showing these events.

On face value, there appear to have been hundreds of short sewage discharges into Otter Ledge in the last few weeks alone.

We have asked South West Water what is happening, but so far there has been no credible answer. Amongst the reasons given, we’ve had “water infiltration into the tank and filling it up”, “leaves and debris” and “the monitors are sensitive”.

So we’ve registered a formal Environmental Information Request to see if we can get some answers – and also to find out what’s really happening here.

100% of Budleigh’s sewage goes through this Sewage Pumping Station, so any fault there could be critical.

With hundreds of reported sewage spills so far this year, you’d expect all of these to be added into the annual 2024 spill count and hours, published in March next year. But that’s not how CSO monitoring works. For each CSO, there is a time threshold (for the Lime Kiln CSO it’s 20 minutes of dumping), below which that spill is ignored. So you could get hundreds of spill events, dumping sewage for many hours, but all of those could be effectively deleted from history.

The other issue is that, although SWW have a ‘real time’ sewage spill alert system, called (ironically perhaps) WaterFit. Any spills show up on this whilst they are occurring, but only the last spill is shown. So a four hour sewage dump, which stops for a few moments and then starts again for one minute, will just show up in WaterFit as a one minute spill – see screenshot above. There is no concept of a spill history in WaterFit.

The nearest we can get to a spill history is the one provided by the SSRS mobile app. This lists any lengthy spills at Budleigh (or any other beach) which last longer than the threshold time.

2024 is looking pretty bleak in the SSRS app so far, with 13 of these longer spills registered in just 7 weeks, compared to 47 in the whole of 2023, and just 16 in 2022.

In addition to this monitored sewage overflow, we have found out that there is an additional Emergency Overflow (EO) at the back of the pump station, which has dumped untreated and unfiltered sewage straight into Kersbrook. Pictures taken from 10th – 17th February 2024 at this outfall show a large amount of toxic waste, including sanitary pads and PPE. We need to know if the recent issues at the sewage pumping station have caused this. Click HERE to see this post for details on the EO discharges.

Time for South West Water to tell us what’s really happening at Lime Kiln Pumping Station, and for them to fix this properly!