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Overpuming is what water companies,
faced with all the above, do when their sewage systems are unable to cope
with the volume of wastewater in the pipes, pumps and plants. To overpump
they apply for a permit from the Environment Agency to flush the excess away, untreated
but usually dilute sewage, into the nearest river or convenient water
course. In the case of the River Test, the ‘overpump’ was from the village
of Longparish which is just north of where the river crosses under the A303
east of Andover, Hampshire. It was to be an unusually egregious form of
overpumping with the necessity to lay hundreds of metres of temporary pipe
from village to river and the digging of a temporary settlement tank
enroute (largely pointless and there for optics not effectiveness) before
the waste was poured into the River Test.
Here are the three things you need to
know about overpumping. Firstly, it has been going on forever but largely
under the radar. All those You Tubes clips of last year that showed the
outpouring of millions of gallons of waste for hundreds of thousands of
hours are the most visible evidence of institutional dumping. However,
public awareness has turned the spotlight on the practice which I suspect
would have gone unnoticed a decade ago. Secondly, the water companies do
not have any real incentive to deal with the issue because it is a good
deal cheaper than the alternatives, namely upgrading the infrastructure and
actually treating the waste. Ironically, the more degraded the pipe network
the better for them as the waste seeps, unseen, into the ground. However,
this out-of-sight-out-of-mind strategy gets upended in wet weather years as
the water table rises to the same level of the pipes thus eliminating
‘helpful’ seepage. Incidentally, most of the same logic applies to septic
tanks for private homes not on main drainage. Finally, the planning system
as currently configured will only make the situation worse. Let me tell you
the madness of it all.
Now, if you or I were building a
family home in an area without mains drainage we would have to install a
self-sufficient, private waste treatment plant at a cost of tens of
thousands of pounds that would have to fulfil vigorous environmental
regulation. If we were a developer building a thousand home estate we would
equally have to comply with stringent rules, not least in separating the
rainfall water from roads, roofs and run off from the home waste, with
separate pipe systems for each. Now this is the way of the future by
avoiding commingling of the large volume of largely harmless rainwater with
the undesirable output from homes and businesses. However, and this is the
madness of our planning system, having gone to all the effort and expense
of separating the two, guess where both end up? Yes, the law obliges the
water company to let us, the developer, connect both waste pipes to the
same main drainpipe!
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