Life of a Chalkstream: The stench of a failing system

Greetings!

Do you live in fear of your home being inundated by a flood? It seems that increasingly more and more people are, with the LV insurance group tweeting last week that flood claims due to drains being unable to cope has increased by 211% in the past four years.

Why might this be? Well, of course the fashionable answer is climate change, that handy excuse bucket into which all hard-to-solve problems are currently thrown. The truth, however, lies less in the skies and more upon the land on which we live due to the volume and location of new housing, plus the failure to build the drainage infrastructure that should go with it.

The LV tweet goes on, by way of explanation, to say ‘despite this 25,550 new homes are approved to be built in flood-risk areas.’ Too right. But LV only mention those about to be built. In the first twenty years of this millennium over a million new homes were built on areas designated with flood-risk, with over 200,000 of those in high flood-risk zones. To repurpose Kevin Costner in the movie Field of Dreams, “If you build it in a wet place, the wet will come”. The fact is that flood plains are Mother Nature’s sponge, existing to absorb the natural cycle of heavy rain. Our forebears didn’t build on them for very good reasons but clearly the current tranche of planning inspectors see themselves as modern day King Canute’s on track to be as every bit as successful.

Of course, it is not just the homes in the flood plains that are causing the problems but also the design and layout of all homes. Increasing housing density leaves less green space for rain absorption, with the ever-increasing amount of hard surfacing turning roads into giant funnels from which even relatively minor inundations cannot escape. Add to this the trend of paving over gardens and you can see where this is all going. Or you might if the infrastructure provided by the water companies for waste and water management had kept pace with the increase in the number of households.

The fact is it simply hasn’t. I could drive you fifteen minutes in any direction from here in Nether Wallop to show you at least a dozen sewage plants where supplementary tankers are daily ferrying away waste from facilities that haven’t been upgraded in decades. Now, the water companies will cite a problem that is clearly not of their own making in that they are legally obliged to permit any new home or development to connect itself to the local mains sewer. And this is clearly a big problem because in the decade 2011-21 the number of households in the UK increased by 1.77 million. However, with an average annual bill of £408 per household that is an extra £722 million a year of income for the water companies to spend on building, upgrading or expanding sewage works.

Now, the water industry and their excusers-in-chief OFWAT will point to annual capital expenditure at an average of £10 billion a year as part evidence of the largesse provided by those extra 1.77 million households. But are they really adding that £722m to the pot? The numbers seem to suggest otherwise. In 2011 UK water industry capital expenditure was £9.8 billion. In 2021, adjusted for inflation that figure was £8.7 billion. So that’s it then; in the space of a decade, we’ve gone from 26.4 million households to 28.1 million but have actually reduced capital expenditure by 16.7% per household.

For some that £722 million each year must represent the sweet smell of success. For the rest of us, as drains back up and rivers carry away untreated sewage, it is the stench of a failing system.

Dam kills fish

Dams kill fish is not a headline you are likely to read anywhere, anytime soon because it fails to support the outpouring of positive messaging around the pro-beaver movement which has captured the hearts of the media and the minds of government.

However, the Environment Agency recently announced research project on the River Tarrant which is addressing that exact issue. For those of you who don’t know it the Tarrant is a relatively small chalkstream (10 miles long) just over the Wiltshire county line in Dorset, a tributary of the much bigger River Stour (61 miles) which is only considered a chalkstream at its upper reaches. It may be for this reason why the Tarrant, which boasts eight villages bearing its name along its short length, is an important spawning river for trout and salmon emanating from the middle Stour.

Winter on the River Tarrant

‘Like many chalk streams, the Tarrant is ground fed and is a ‘winterbourne’ – it naturally dries up in summer. Unnaturally, because of man-made in-stream structures such as weirs, the Tarrant dries up from the bottom - leaving fish stranded behind the structures.’

So write the Environment Agency who most years rescue hundreds of stranded fish from the Tarrant and move them to the Stour. The study, funded to the tune of £20,000 by the Water Environment Improvement Fund is to examine the seven obstacles hindering fish passage with a view to improving the spawning outcomes in this chalkstream.

Honestly, I hang my head in despair. Beavers will create hundreds of Tarrants across Britain, as vulnerable chalkstreams and small rivers are dammed to destruction. In Devon I’ve seen the future where watertight ‘natural’ dams kill a river from the bottom up. Yes, there is a beautiful wetland above but below the dam, what was once a pretty stream minding its own business, becomes a dried-up ditch.

Summer on the River Tarrant

Let it Rain! Let it Rain! Let it Rain!

It is around this time of year I hope to start to hum, with a happy heart and a slight modification to the lyrics, that Christmas classic Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow! every time it rains.

The song was written in the midst of a Californian heatwave in July 1945 with the writers Sammy Cahn and Jule Styne imagining cooler conditions; having been through the battle we call the drought of 2022, I sort of have some idea of their thought process. And, as it turns out, I have had plenty of cause to hum both in October and November as the rains have returned with a 129% of average rainfall in the former and 170% in the latter.

This is great news because, as you well know, the period October-February is critical to the health of the chalkstreams when the aquifers that will carry us through the spring and summer are recharged by the winter rains. It is a vast generalisation, but the often-cited 80/20 rule applies to the spring fed rivers with 4/5^th of the flow provided by the springs and 1/5^th from rainfall that flows direct from land to river, though that statistic should be used with caution applying more to the summer than winter times.

Here is the latest rainfall data from the Environment Agency. As you will see the effect of the drought, as measured by the LTA (long term average) for the past 12 months is at 79%, though this hides large regional variations with the north-east at 92% and south-west at 74%. National water grid anyone? The past six months is much the same, but you’ll see for the latest three months August-October we are closer to normal at 95% with little regional variation.

As to river flows, the November map is flashing mostly black or blue which is a good thing, indicating river flows above normal or high. Indeed, I was in Winchester on Sunday where the Itchen was piling through The Old Mill, coming close to the top edge of the footpath along the Cathedral close.

All in all, given a couple more wet months, we’ll be home and dry so to speak for 2023.

CHALK 5 years on

I was horrified when one of the collaborators reminded me that next week marks the 5^th anniversary of the movie CHALK.

Five years on, despite a pandemic and numerous Prime Ministers in between, the 2017 premiere night in Leicester Square remains fixed in my mind as the apex of one of the finest creative projects I have ever been involved with.

By way of marking the occasion our streaming hosts Fishing TV are offering a free viewing of CHALK on Sunday 11 December for one day only. Click here to view. No login, app or registration required.

Happy watching!

Tony King

Your kind words and anecdotes of days on the river with Tony flooded in on news of his death earlier in the month. There were too many for me to reply individually so please accept this as my note of thanks.

Once the pain has passed a little, I am going to put them together for his family to read - I know it will mean a great deal.

Here are two Tony classics as reported:

Exhibit A

Client - “You must guide a lot of mediocre fishermen, Tony.

Tony - “No, they are not all bad, some of them are bloody useless.”

Exhibit B

“The Damsels would have won [The One Fly] but for my over enthusiastic last cast of the day. The fly set itself free and disappeared over the opposite bank. By this stage I had joined Tony in his laid-back approach to life and fishing and we shrugged our shoulders and set off to the pub.”

Watch this clip of Tony when he was featured for CHALK on the River Frome.

And the winner is .......

Another season done – it was something of a white-knuckle ride as the drought started to bite in June. As you will know, we ceased fishing on some headwaters and smaller streams but, and it did take most of us by surprise, where the volume of the water and the size of the river is more substantial, things held up remarkably well.

All that said, the low flows in October have made for a particularly difficult start to the grayling season who were very skittish in low to skinny water. However, we’ve now gone to the other extreme with so much water that they are hard to see! Whoever said fishing was fickle?

I must thank you all for your many fishing reports. They are an invaluable tool for us to know what you think and see. I can promise they all are read by me, I always reply when you ask, or I can add something useful. They are also passed to our owners and river keepers, often discussed at length during our end of season reviews. Keep ‘em coming and thanks again.

Finally, it falls to me to announce the winner for October as Will Foss who might feel a little unlucky collecting the snood as he was a hair’s breadth away from Dan Woolger who fished Donnington Grove on the River Lambourn in August, winning a limited-edition Hardy Brothers 150ANV LW Reel made to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the founding of the company.

Both in the post today! Onwards to 2023 .....