They said it could prejudice an ongoing criminal investigation by the Environment Agency (EA) and Ofwat into their activities.The regulator – the Environment Agency – which had the data, disagreed, and in January handed it to the BBC.Speaking to the BBC before the election, Helen Wakeham, head of water at the EA, said the whole point of monitoring was to increase transparency, and they wanted to make the data more publicly available.
Over 18 months we analysed data from nearly 10,000 monitors which had recorded more than 1.5 million hours of discharges.BBC analysis suggests dry spills may have started on more than 200 days in 2022, lasting more than 29,000 hours – including during the record summer heatwave when people were cooling off in England’s rivers and seas.“We are most concerned about those [spill] events happening in places where people are likely to go in the river,” said Professor Barbara Evans, chair in public health engineering at the University of Leeds.Consumption of water contaminated with human or animal faeces exposes people to parasites and bacteria such as cryptosporidium and E.coli, which cause diarrhoea and vomiting, or viruses like hepatitis A which can lead to liver infection.
This enables the EA to investigate potential cases of dry spills and to decide whether it will take any action.The BBC has been analysing data behind the 2022 report, but in responding to our findings, the water companies argue that the datasets are unverified and contain errors.Examples of potential dry spills in the data were presented to each water company.
No other country in the world publishes this sort of data.”In May, Anglian Water was found guilty of failing to provide data to the Environment Agency for their investigation – and it will be sentenced in July.
South West Water said: “We are clear that storm overflows must only be used when absolutely necessary to protect people’s homes and regard all unpermitted dry spills as unacceptable.”Yorkshire Water and Northumbrian Water said they: “Do not believe the [BBC’s findings] are true reflection of dry discharge numbers.”United Utilities said: “The information you have received from the Environment Agency reflects unvalidated, raw signals and not validated start/stop times.”Anglian declined to provide a formal comment on the BBC analysis, but in correspondence to the BBC said that the monitor data was not enough to determine dry spills due to monitor malfunctions, and said the methodology was flawed.The three companies investigated by the BBC last year also responded to our new findings.A Thames Water spokesperson said: “There are a number of methodologies for defining and calculating why and how dry day spills occur.“We regard all discharges of untreated sewage as unacceptable, and we have planned investment in our sewage treatment works to reduce the need for untreated discharges.”A Wessex Water spokesperson said: “Naturally occurring groundwater can enter sewers, often from private pipes and in dry weather, which can cause overflows to operate for days or even months.“We agree overflows are outdated so we’re investing £3 million a month to help reduce how often they automatically operate.”A spokesperson for Southern Water said: “In areas with high levels of residual groundwater, spills can happen outside of periods of rainfall.
Water and sewerage companies are responsible for outlets known as combined sewer overflows (CSOs), which release sewage from treatment works or the sewage network into the UK's waterways.The majority of CSOs record when they discharge.For this analysis, the BBC took the start-stop times of individual discharges from the CSOs and converted them into the standard 12/24-hour counting blocks used by the EA to determine "spills".In the specific case of United Utilities, the BBC found that some of the discharge data provided to the EA did not correspond to their 2022 annual report summarising this data.
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