Swimmers avoiding the water over fears of raw sewage on UK beaches
Concerns over water quality have discouraged a quarter of summer bathers from taking the plunge
Did this use to happen?
No, UK beaches were increasingly becoming the cleanest in Europe.
However that stopped around 13 years ago and the water companies keep emergency dumping waste water.
TL;DR: English water and sewage is handled by private, for-profit, companies that have majority ownership outside britain.
Furthermore the current chairman of the regulatory comission has previously been accused of misusing funds for Network Rail, abusing staff, accepting what amounts to bribes, etc.
Or in one word: capitalism.
Also when the UK brexited they also left the EU regulations on water quality (including the well-known "blue flag").
I mean, what did people that voted for the side who very overtly wanted to "burn EU regulations" expect it would happen???!
What's so bad about private, foreign owned companies managing public utilities?
13 years later Oh...
Abusing funds of network rail explains why our train network is absolutely piss poor.
The news about this has been around for a while, I'm pretty horrified that it's taken people this long to keep out of the sea. 🤮
Avoiding being in the water might not have been, but sewage runoff during rains has been in most older cities; it's a result of having combined sewers. Cities started moving to having seperate sewage and rainwater systems some time back, but older cities won't do that.
Over here in the US, cities in the western part of the US -- the youngest ones -- generally don't see it, but ones in the eastern part still do. In Europe, where cities have generally been around for a while, it's a thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combinedsewer
A combined sewer is a type of gravity sewer with a system of pipes, tunnels, pump stations etc. to transport sewage and urban runoff together to a sewage treatment plant or disposal site. This means that during rain events, the sewage gets diluted, resulting in higher flowrates at the treatment site. Uncontaminated stormwater simply dilutes sewage, but runoff may dissolve or suspend virtually anything it contacts on roofs, streets, and storage yards.
Combined sewers can cause serious water pollution problems during combined sewer overflow (CSO) events when combined sewage and surface runoff flows exceed the capacity of the sewage treatment plant, or of the maximum flow rate of the system which transmits the combined sources. In instances where exceptionally high surface runoff occurs (such as large rainstorms), the load on individual tributary branches of the sewer system may cause a back-up to a point where raw sewage flows out of input sources such as toilets, causing inhabited buildings to be flooded with a toxic sewage-runoff mixture, incurring massive financial burdens for cleanup and repair. When combined sewer systems experience these higher than normal throughputs, relief systems cause discharges containing human and industrial waste to flow into rivers, streams, or other bodies of water. Such events frequently cause both negative environmental and lifestyle consequences, including beach closures, contaminated shellfish unsafe for consumption, and contamination of drinking water sources, rendering them temporarily unsafe for drinking and requiring boiling before uses such as bathing or washing dishes.
Mitigation of combined sewer overflows include sewer separation, CSO storage, expanding sewage treatment capacity, retention basins, screening and disinfection facilities, reducing stormwater flows, green infrastructure and real-time decision support systems.
This type of gravity sewer design is less often used nowadays when constructing new sewer systems. Modern-day sewer designs exclude surface runoff by building sanitary sewers instead, but many older cities and towns continue to operate previously constructed combined sewer systems.
Some US cities have undertaken sewer separation projects — building a second piping system for all or part of the community. In many of these projects, cities have been able to separate only portions of their combined systems. High costs or physical limitations may preclude building a completely separate system.
Yet in the UK things were improving until 13 years ago when they started getting worse.
They didn't suddenly combine the running water and sewage disposal in a single system 13 years ago so clearly something else made the difference.
Increased heavy rain events have been happening due to global warming, which has exacerbated it. 2010, 13 years ago, was a significantly drier year, and subsequent to that, there has been more rainfall then prior, and it has been more concentrated in heavy rain events. Heavy rain events are what drive the sewage runoff.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/322810/average-rainfall-in-the-united-kingdom-uk/
Between 2001 and 2022, the average rainfall in the United Kingdom varied greatly. In 2010, rainfall dropped to a low of 1,020 millimeters, which was a noticeable decrease when compared to the previous year. However, the following year rainfall increased significantly to a peak of 1,889 millimeters. During the period in consideration, rainfall rarely rose above 1,500 millimeters. In 2022, the annual average rainfall in the UK nearly reached 1,321 millimeters.
The latest State of the UK Climate report indicates the UK has become wetter over the last few decades, although with significant annual variation. 2011-2020 was 9% wetter than 1961-1990.
The number of days where rainfall totals exceed 95% and 99% of the 1961-1990 average have increased in the last decade, as have rainfall events exceeding 50 mm. Both these trends point to an increase in frequency and intensity of rainfall across the UK.