Owl admires the way local people in Exmouth and Budleigh are peeling away the secrecy surrounding South West Water’s operations.

[PS One of Owl’s “little birdies” whispered that these tankers cost around £1K a day.]

Petercrwilliams fightingpoolution.com

It’s nearly three weeks since Budleigh’s Marine Parade has become a lorry park, with up to 8 tankers parked up along the front at any one time.

There have been lots of varying reasons provided, including at least three from South West Water themselves. Most recently I’ve heard that the tankers were “dumping raw sewage into the sewage system here” (spoiler alert: they’re not!).

To understand what they are doing – and why it should be a really good thing for us – a quick recap on ‘Combined Sewage Overflows’ (or CSOs), and why they are the major cause of sewage spills in this country.

Sewer pipes have a finite capacity to transfer sewage to pumping stations or treatment plants. Because these sewer pipes carry rain-water run-off as well as raw sewage, the total volume entering the pipes when it’s raining, can be greater than the pipe’s capacity. For this reason, there are regular storm tanks incorporated into the sewer system, which act as temporary holding tanks to even out the flow. However, if these storm tanks fill up, they have an outlet that they open, called a Combined Sewage Overflow (CSO), which spills the excess water and raw sewage into a nearby stream or the sea. To avoid us seeing too much gory detail, the only treatment made is to filter this through a 6mm sieve before dumping it into our environment. These CSO’s are the #1 cause of sewage dumps in the UK.

In Budleigh, we have 2 CSO’s that dump into Kersbrook – on the edge of our Nature Reserve, another goes out to Otter Ledge (more on that next time!), and 5 CSO’s can dump sewage into the Knowle Brook which runs through Budleigh High Street. All except the Otter Ledge outfall end up on our beach.

In 2022 (the last year that SWW have released data for), Budleigh’s CSO’s dumped raw sewage 56 times, for a total duration of nearly 300 hours. Full details HERE. As that was an exceptionally dry year, it’s quite possible that 2023 was even worse (data to be released at end March).

So why are the tankers on Marine Parade ‘Good News’?

The key task they seem to be working on is to clean out the Marine Parade storm tank and associated sewer pipes. This CSO system appears to be over 100m long, running most of the way along the sea front. Over years, it’s become blocked with a mix of fat-bergs, ‘disposable’ wipes, sand and pebbles – reducing it’s holding capacity and flow. These are all now being sucked up into the tankers, and taken off for disposal. Because of the length of the tank and pipes, it’s taken 3 weeks and counting. Big thanks to the team who are doing this – it must be pretty unpleasant working conditions down there!

Marine Parade CSO was one of our worst offenders in 2022, with over 11 hours of sewage dumping onto the western end of Budleigh beach – so hopefully having the full capacity of the storm tank will reduce or eliminate that threat. The main beneficiaries of this work should be all those who swim around the Steamer Steps end of our beach.

We do have evidence that cleaning storm tanks can work here, as the CSO in Meadow Road was cleaned in 2021 – and zero spills were recorded there in 2022. Results are not guaranteed though, as the CSO at the bottom end of Granary Lane was cleaned out in January this year, but it is still recording sewage spills into the Kersbrook in the last month.

Let’s hope that this vital maintenance work marks a step in the right direction, and increases the number of days when we can all swim in clean, sewage-free water.