11-06-2025
Southampton flats released sewage into river for 35 years
A block of flats has been illegally releasing wastewater straight into a river for more than 35 years, a water company has Water said it found the worst misconnection staff had ever seen at Royal Court on Upper Grosvenor Road in Trinder, from the water operator's illegal connections team, said since 1989 it could have released 11 million litres of sewage into the River Itchen from toilets company said it was now working to put the situation right.
Mr Trinder, who tracks the sources of contamination into surface water drains from homes and businesses, said: "I've never seen anything like this before. "It can take a lot of work to track down one faulty connection but it's important work as a single loo can produce 20,000 litres of sewage a year."
'Off the charts'
He said in addition to the sewage, water from showers, baths, dishwashers and washing machines would also have flowed into the river."We knew we were on to something big as soon as we started sampling – the contamination was off the charts," he team lifted a series of manholes to trace the issue and eventually arrived at Upper Grosvenor Road."We put our CCTV camera down the surface water pipe and couldn't believe our eyes – rows of private sewage pipes were punched through the side and into the drainage pipe," Mr Trinder recalled."This pipe then runs straight into the Itchen."Darko Zlatarek, the misconnections team leader, said the case was "on another level".He described the Itchen as "such a sensitive habitat" and said Southern Water was "spending millions in the area to protect wildlife and support a council application for a new bathing water designation".The company was hit with a £90m fine four years ago, after raw sewage was discharged across Hampshire, West Sussex and Kent.
Usually it is the duty of householders to correct Southern Water said the "scale and importance" of the find meant it was seeking the landowner's permission to fix it without the discovery the company has been pumping out the sewage before it reaches the Itchen and taking it away by tanker to be 15 flats were constructed in 1989, prior to the creation of Southern company recently signed deals worth approximately £540m to "boost" its wastewater network performance across the South East.
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