Anglian Water judged too slow to react and fined £29,000 for raw sewage release

A judge has fined Anglian Water £18,000 and ordered it to pay close to £11,000 in costs for failures at one of its pumping stations after an Environment Agency probe concluded the company had a “reactive attitude” to pollution.

The water firm pleaded guilty to breaching environmental permitting regulations. It was judged to have failed to assign the correct priority of response when a sewage pump failed at the site at Yaxley, near Peterborouigh where another pump was already out of order.

The pumps were meant to regulate the flow of effluent but had with had stopped within a week of each other leaving raw sewage pouring into Pig Water Drain for several hours before an engineer arrived at the pumping station.

The Environment Agency said the incident in February 2019 killed at least 60 fish including roach, pike and eel. The final death toll was believed to be higher, as fish were killed by reduced oxygen and ammonia in the water.

The Environment Agency told the court: “With only a single pump in operation, this was always likely to increase the chances of an incident. Anglian Water should have sped up its response time as a result. Many hours passed before a technician stopped sewage entering the water.

“Anglian Water could and should have acted quicker.”

An Environment Agency officer called to the scene saw effluent gushing into the “grey and murky” water from a pipe traced back to the pumping station, supposed to control the flow of sewage through the sewer network.

Anglian Water staff seemed blind to the ongoing incident – one employee telling the technician there was nothing wrong, that no sewage was being pumped into the river.

Roach, pike and eel were among 60 dead fish recovered from the scene, but fisheries specialists from the Environment Agency believe many more would have been killed by a sharp decline in water quality caused by the release of the effluent.