The UK’s public health body has called for the need to modernise the sewage system after many beaches closed when heavy rainfall prompted water companies to dump waste into the sea.
“We need a sewage system fit for the 21st century that stops discharging sewage wherever possible,” said Jim McManus, president of the UK’s Association of Directors of Public Health.
McManus, in an interview with BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Friday, warned of ear and eye infections or even hepatitis A being contracted in dirty water. “There are health impacts being seen and sometimes you see GPs reporting on those every year.”
Wales meanwhile declared a drought on Friday and banned hosepipe use in some parts of the country for the first time in 40 years.
Natural Resources Wales said the region had received 65.5 per cent of its average rainfall for July, putting a strain on public water supplies in Pembrokeshire and Carmarthenshire.
The Environment Agency issued pollution alerts for more than 15 beaches this week, while eight bathing sites along the Sussex coast were closed after Southern Water dumped wastewater there.
Regulations allow water companies to discharge wastewater and untreated sewage into the sea via combined sewage overflows, which hold waste along with excess rainwater.
Southern Water and South West Water are among the poorest performers. Southern Water, which serves nearly 5mn people in Kent, Sussex, Hampshire and the Isle of Wight, was last year fined a record £90mn after pleading guilty to thousands of pollution discharges in the five years to 2015.
The performance of water companies on sewage management has fallen to its worst level in a decade, the Environment Agency said in its annual report last month.
The agency called for “prison sentences for chief executives and board members whose companies are responsible for the most serious incidents”, adding that company directors should be “struck off so they cannot move on in their careers after illegal environmental damage”.
“Our rivers and beaches are once again being treated as open sewers,” the activist group Surfers Against Sewage said on Twitter. “Years of underinvestment is now in plain sight.”
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2022-08-19 09:46:47Z
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