Wessex Water fined £0.5m for negligence in reporting sewage leaks

Wessex Water has been fined £500,000 after being found negligent in its delayed reporting of incidents to the Environment Agency after sewage leaks killed thousands of fish.

Swindon Magistrates’ Court fined the company after it had pleaded guilty at an earlier hearing to two charges: one related to the Bowerhill Lodge sewage pumping station at Melksham, and the other related to a burst rising sewer main at the Wick St Lawrence sewage treatment works near Weston-super-Mare.

The company was also ordered to pay costs of £60,000.

The Bowerhill Lodge charges were of causing storm water to discharge into the River Avon tributary, Clackers Brook, between late March and early April 2018; and of discharging screened sewage at the same location in late July to early August 2018. District Judge, Joanna Dickens, said Wessex Water’s failure to report discharges at Bowerhill Lodge “undermines the regulatory regime.” She later noted that the company had since taken “considerable and expensive steps” to remedy the situation.

The charge at Weston-super-Mare was of causing untreated sewage effluent to discharge into a marsh drainage channel from a rising main leading into the treatment works. The discharge was caused by a mechanical failure and continued for 54.5 hours with sewage flowing through a nature conservation area. The company did not report this to the Environment Agency immediately.

The investigation found that failures of the sewage pumping station’s alarm and telemetry system, and a power cable becoming entangled in pump equipment, contributed to the failures. Further investigation found that there had been other discharges from Bowerhill Lodge Pumping Station earlier that year that Wessex Water had not reported to the Environment Agency.

The court heard that more than 2,100 fish died in the Clackers Brook, including three threatened species: eels, lamprey and bullheads.

At Wick St Lawrence, much of the local drainage channel was contaminated with sewage, leading to fish, including sticklebacks and eels, dying after a rising main burst despite it being flagged as in need of monitoring.

Investigations revealed that a September 2018 document submitted by Wessex Water to Ofwat showed the number of rising main bursts were running at 70-80 per year.  The company predicted it would need to replace them at nine times its current rate to remain stable.