Last week's Tonight programme on ITV was titled 'how safe is your beach?', and proceeded to investigate the cleanliness of sand and water on our nations beaches - particularly those rated 'good' that turned out to be 'bad'.
Tonight does have a habit of reducing important issues to sub-tabloid levels of hyper-sensationalism, but it was pretty well balanced and didn't get too over excited despite the use of a lot of rather nebulous stats. What exactly does a "one in seven chance of getting sick" really mean? Am I really going to get sick every seventh time I go swimming? I do worry that alarmist stats like that actually numb the viewer into a general sense of unspecific unease without helping to really press the case. We don't want people to avoid the beach - just take more care of it.
As clean beaches are the basic raison d'etre of this blog I was delighted to see the issue on prime-time, even if there was a definite sense of deja vu. The Beeb's Panorama covered the story in slightly more graphic style last year from Surfers Against Sewage's perspective and Tonight's version didn't raise much that was really new. They were obviously sparked by the release of the MCS' annual Good Beach Guide, which is a curate's egg of a thing, as the BBC website reported with a blindingly confused title, "More UK bathing beaches have excellent water quality than last year, but pollution has worsened since 2006, the Marine Conservation Society says. It rated 421 of 769 beaches as excellent - 33 more than 2009, but below the 505 rated highly in 2006."
I'm afraid that if you're being harsh that synopsis really reads as 'Some of Britain's beaches are a bit better than last year but they're mainly still shit'.
I did enjoy the part of the programme where the reporter gave the Environment Agency spokesman a deserved kicking and the poorly-chosen spokesman for the water industry twitched and flinched through the interrogation and just made his clients look as culpable as they undoubtedly are.
The idiot from the EA made the statement that you were 'more likely to drown on a beach than get sick from the water', which the reporter quickly informed us was rubbish - actually there's a one in a million chance of drowning versus the vaunted one in seven chance of getting sick. The man from the Agency quickly disappeared up his own fundament with gibberish phrases like 'I'm not sighted on that intelligence' and firmly proved that the EA has no control over the water industry it is supposed to police (it lets them record and reveal how often they pump poop into the oceans without any oversight), and worse, that its senior officials are happy to blurt out made up stats.
So here we are again. Another pretty good bit of TV that highlights a serious problem and reminds us how dangerous uncontrolled utilities companies can be, but what will actually happen to improve the situation, particularly in relation to allowing untreated sewage to be vented into the sea?
SAS reports that there are over "4,000 unregulated Combine Sewer Overflows (CSOs)" in the UK which are overflow pipes which release excess 'fluid' into the sea when the storm drains overwhelm the sewage system. The water industry seems reluctant in the extreme to do anything to prevent or even reduce the practice, but in a country where it has been known to rain a bit, it seems unbelievable that this 17th century practice is still so prevalent.
SAS are maintaining their pressure (see their article here), but they acknowledge that it will require more action to see significant change.
What no-one asked is why raw sewage has to be pumped into the sea at any time? What are the alternatives and why aren't they happening or being made to happen? The age-old argument that it's a problem of the the antiquated infrastructure that the water companies inherited can't be sustained any longer. Surely they should be obligated to find a way of keeping storm water and sewage separate. With BP having to shoulder responsibility for the toxins they're releasing into the Gulf of Mexico, so too should the water companies take responsibility for their mess.
From an economic point of view, the water companies' major costs are tied to the volumes of water that they have to treat - thus CSO's provide a handy reduction in sewage that they have to process, reducing treatment volumes and therefore costs. Just as a bye-the-bye, I read that Severn Trent Water has reported a 19% increase in profits to £541m for 2009/10 and
South West Water's pre-tax profits have risen by almost 9% over the past 12 months.
Profits went up by 8.7% to £132.5m.
A quick wild under-guesstimate.
4,000 CSOs each releasing 100,000 litres each stormy day (I imagine it's a lot more given that an Olympic pool holds 2.5 million litres), and guess that there are a minimum of 30 stormy days a year? Equals a rough 12,000,000,000 litres. Or a little over a European billion.
Even if you wildly under-guesstimate the amount of merdre being released by the CSO's around the coast, it adds up to a frightening amount of crap that really has no business being there at all and a huge saving to the companies' shareholders.
What to do? Simples as the meercat would say. Install flow metres on every CSO and charge the responsible company per litre that is released. Fair discounts will apply for the ratio of water to poo, but a base of 50p per litre would make the companies move pretty quickly I'd imagine (£6 billion by my spurious maths).
Reasons why not? None I can see.
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