Yorkshire Water fined £233,000 after admitting responsibility for sewage leak

Yorkshire Water has been fined £233,000 after admitting responsibility for a sewage leak that killed hundreds of fish near Bradford in 2017. The Environment Agency brought the prosecution.

The court heard the leak was caused by failure of a valve at Yorkshire Water’s Dale Road sewage pumping station that released raw sewage into Tong Beck over four days in November 2017.

The Environment Agency found that the discharge had caused “significant damage to the ecology of the beck and led to the death of hundreds of adult and juvenile brown trout.”

Yorkshire Water’s Dale Road site is automated and unmanned. The failure occurred in what was intended to be a temporary pump which was not installed to the same standard as permanent infrastructure.

It was installed in 2012 after the Environment Agency had raised concerns with the pumps at the pumping station in 2010/11. The temporary pump was not mapped by Yorkshire Water on its asset record system or scheduled for inspection. Also the rising main fed by the pump was not monitored by Yorkshire Water’s telemetry system so there was no notification of the valve failure.