Exclusive: Whistleblowers point to broader sewage scandal, with wastewater systems manipulated to divert sewage
histleblowers say UK water companies are knowingly failing to treat legally required amounts of sewage, and that some treatment works are manipulating wastewater systems to divert raw sewage away from the works and into rivers and seas.
One industry insider says they “have personally surveyed works and found valves operated and diversion pipes installed so that part of the flow arriving is deliberately diverted to an environmentally sensitive stream, rather than into the works, so that the works passes compliance of sanitary parameters.
“It is an enormous scandal that many who work in the industry know about, but nobody wants to talk about,” said the whistleblower. “Water companies report their overall compliance with wastewater rules as good, but dig a little deeper and you’ll see that lots of treatment works are failing to deal with the amount of sewage they are legally meant to treat.”
A second insider says it is “almost standard practice to control penstocks by hand to set it at a limit to reduce the flow”, adding that the problem “stems from sweating the assets … There are a lot of undersized, overcapacity sewage treatment works out there … and I’ve rarely seen a works where all the assets are working, there’s usually something out of service.
According to a fourth whistleblower, it is possible to identify instances of flow trimming in a company’s figures “but no one truly looks into the data, they won’t look at the detail”.
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