Water bosses face up to two years in prison under moves to crack down on pollution in rivers and seas.
The Government will on Thursday unveil a package of measures designed to combat the regular dumping of sewage by water companies.
After all, the problem in that country is greater…..even if it is a state owned company.
Water bosses will face a maximum sentence of two years in jail, as will any other employees found to be directly blocking investigations by the Environment Agency or the Drinking Water Inspectorate.
Note that jail’s for obstructing the bureaucracy tho’, not for anythin to do with actual sewage
Heard about jailing water company bosses on the Toady programme this morning, but they made no mention of jail being for “directly blocking investigations”.
My first thought was, well, as there is no chance they will be able to stop the release of raw sewage there isn’t going to be anyone applying for the job of ‘Chief Executive of XXXX water company’ then, but this explains it further.
Al Beeb doing their level best to misinform the sheeple. Again.
#believeallbeuracrats
I’d love a source that the problem’s worse in Scotland. It may well be, but I thought that it wasn’t measured so it can’t definitely be said.
@ Bloke in Aberdeen
The state-owned Scottish Water only reports outflows from the 4% of sites that are monitored, ignoring the outflows from the other 96% of the sites. The 4% had 14,000-odd cases of sewage being dumped last year so, as “Surfers Against Sewage” point out the true number of instances is in the hundreds of thousands – making Thames Water look like “Mr Clean”, in comparison (Thames Water supplies many more customers than Scottish Water)
I’d be wary of doing simple extrapolations of the Scottish numbers. A lot of Scotland is fairly sparsely populated, I don’t know the locations of the outflows being measured but they are likely to be in the more civilised areas of the country.
Also a note on comparing England and Scotland’s water companies performance, we have had very little population growth up here. The infrastructure is not being stressed the way it is in England.
There are civilised areas of Scotland?
@ Bloke in Scotland
Yes, extrapolation is not going to be linear but if the average number of overflows in the other 96% was even one-third as frequent as those measured the total would be well over 100k per annum.
Since the size of sewage treatment plants is going to be proportional to the expected throughput one would expect the overflow frequency to be similar (there is likely to be an increase if the local population grows but that implies that the number of overflows near Glasgow will be significantly *lower* than average since Glasgow’s population is more than 10% lower than it was when I left Scotland).
Hundreds of thousands seems plausible to me.
Portaloos are an ordeal that distance runners and triathletes have to endure. In fact they are quite cleverly designed but, at the basic level, you shit and piss into a tank, maybe three or four cubic metres in capacity and these are emptied periodically by a tanker. It was at an Endure 24 event near Leeds where, despite there being row upon row of the things, the organisers seem to have underestimated the number required and the tankers were struggling to keep them emptied. I don’t really have any figures for the number of runners and their support crews, or for the number of Portaloos, but I was quite astonished by the huge volume of shit that such a gathering of people produce. It wasn’t so long ago that it was normal just to stick it straight into the sea. As a kid I can remember going to the beach at Filey and finding the sea full of floating turds and shreds of bog paper. So yes, failure of waste water processing needs addressing, but hell we’ve come a long way in just my lifetime.
Incidentally, the world record for twenty four hour running is now close to two hundred miles, which I find quite astonishing.