Thames Water Fined for Surrey River Pollution

Thames Water has been fined £220,000 and ordered to pay costs of £27,500 at Guildford Crown Court for polluting the River Blackwater, a tributary of the River Lodden in Surrey

In a court case brought by the Environment Agency, Thames Water was found guilty of breaching its environmental permit by allowing sewage to enter the river on two occasions in September 2012.

Pollution resulting from the incidents at Camberley Sewage Treatment Works (STW) was reported to have killed more than 100 fish in the river, which flows through a Site of Special Scientific Interest.

At Guildford Crown Court, Thames Water was fined and also ordered to pay costs of £27,500 by Judge Lucas, who said it was ‘important the courts send out a clear message' to all utility companies.

"Regulations are there to protect the environment and the courts will act firmly where those regulations are breached and where the environment is either damaged or put at risk of damage," the judge said.

The case was first heard last September at Redhill Magistrates Court.

Given the seriousness of the offences, it was committed to crown court for sentencing, where higher penalties could be imposed.

Thames Water pleaded guilty to causing pollution to an environmentally sensitive site on September 7 and September 30 2012, by way of ‘illegal discharges of polluting effluent' from the Camberley STW.

The court heard the Environment Agency received reports of dead fish at Shepherd Meadows Nature Reserve, Sandhurst, on September 7 and sent officers to the site.

They found ‘distressed, gasping and dead fish' in the river margins from Blackwater train station to Shepherds Meadow, nearly two kilometres downstream from Camberley STW.

Their investigation found that a problem at the STW had led to partially-treated sewage being discharged into the river, suffocating fish over a distance of around 1.5km.

Thames Water blamed its contractors for the fault, but the judge concluded that the company had been ‘reckless in relation to the incident' and that ‘significant environmental harm had been caused'.

The court also heard that, on September 30, Thames Water reported to the Environment Agency that there had been an hour-long illegal discharge into the river from storm tanks at the same STW.

The company accepted that the discharge was caused by a build-up of toilet paper and sewage debris which creating a blockage and diverted screened raw sewage to the storm tanks.

This led to the storm tanks filling up and discharging sewage into the river.

Judge Lucas concluded that the company was negligent in allowing the blockage to occur, and that the discharge would have ‘resulted in some harm to the water quality'.

Speaking after the case, senior Environment Agency officer Andrew Valantine said: "Unfortunately, the first incident was a serious one which led to fish being killed and the water quality being badly affected over a significant stretch of the river.

Source: Get Surrey

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