Over the past five years Thames Water identified 2,294 drainage misconnections across London where foul waste pipes were linked into surface water networks that discharge to rivers. Builders typically make the misconnections; water companies do not, and building inspectors often fail to detect them. Those misconnections cause raw sewage from toilets, showers and washing machines to enter rivers, destroying plants, invertebrates and fish and degrading waterways. Volunteer monitoring and limited water company tracing programs usually uncover problems; those programs are laborious, underfunded and lack a target for complete elimination. Responsibility to fix misconnections ultimately falls to property owners, complicating remediation.
By putting sewage, including both toilet waste and that from showers and washing machines, into rivers we are destroying the building blocks of aquatic life. No plants, no invertebrates, no fish. The consequences for nature are disastrous, but this also has an impact on human welfare. Who wants to live next to, or visit, a stinking watercourse which gives no life or joy to wildlife or to humans?
These mistakes are often not detected by building inspectors, who seem not to be liable. They are usually only detected as a result of volunteer action - [through] witnessing polluted water going into a river. The water companies run programmes to trace pollution back from the river to the homes or businesses from which it is coming [but] these are very laborious and run on a limited budget, with no target for complete elimination.
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