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29
Nov
How Harrogate's Victorian plumbing system is polluting becks
Harrogate’s muddled underground plumbing is polluting our rivers, and it will be a long and labour-intensive business to sort it out, according to speakers at an event this week.
About 50 people attended the presentation at St Peter’s Church on Wednesday evening, which was organised by the Yorkshire Dales Rivers Trust (YDRT) with Nidd Action Group, the Environment Agency and Yorkshire Water.
Among them were a good number of volunteers who had taken part over the summer in an ‘outfall safari’, walking up Oak Beck and Bilton Beck in Harrogate from their confluences with the River Nidd to the top of their catchments.
Their mission was to map all the outfalls – pipes and drains – flowing into the becks and to measure the amount of ammonia and phosphates in the water.
Large quantities of ammonia suggest contamination from human waste, and phosphates can indicate the presence of household detergents – both signs of plumbing misconnections.
This is a common sight at some outfalls in local becks. Photo: YDRT.
Sarah Lonsdale of the YDRT ran through the results of the survey, which make for shocking reading.
In just over 10km of river surveyed, the volunteers found 64 outfalls, 37 of which were actively flowing even in dry weather – suggesting a faulty connection somewhere – and 29 of which were polluting the water.
Only three of these exceeded the trigger point for ammonia, but 10 tested positive for elevated levels of phosphates, and at some outfalls volunteers could even smell washing powder.
Ms Lonsdale said:
It’s important to remember that this was just a snapshot of one moment in time, and some of the outfalls that were dry when we visited may have been running at other times, if someone had been having a shower or putting a load of washing through.
'Disproportionately complicated'
The problem, explained Jamie Duncan of the Environment Agency, is Harrogate’s plumbing. He said:
It’s a disproportionately complicated network, and that stems partially from the very reason for Harrogate’s existence. Its groundwater and the pipes that were laid to take it around the town were deemed acceptable in the Industrial Revolution and even in the 1960s and ’70s, when a lot of new houses were connected to the Victorian sewer network. We’re now trying to catch up with sorting that out.
A culvert on one of the becks. Photo: YDRT.
He urged people to report any instances of pollution they may see. He said:
Calling in these problems creates a bank of evidence that puts pressure on us [the Environment Agency] and the water companies to act and put things right, so it’s very important.
It’s a bit like getting an appointment at the doctor’s – the more of a pain in the arse you are, the sooner you get a result. So the more people in Harrogate complain and report faults to the Environment Agency and Yorkshire Water, the more resources will be put that way.
Clare Beasant of Yorkshire Water said that once an outfall was reported by a volunteer to be flowing in dry weather, a team was dispatched straight away to determine if it was a Yorkshire Water pipe, and if so, dye was dropped into manholes to find out where the effluent was coming from.
She said:
If we don’t have any luck doing that, we start knocking on doors. Sometimes we find that a house’s wastewater pipe has been wrongly connected and is flowing straight into the surface water drainage system [i.e. the roadside gullies], which flows into the river.
Usually, the homeowner is mortified to find they’re causing pollution, and they tend to get it sorted, but it can take some time.
Pollution in Oak Beck.
Misconnected washing machine
Mr Duncan said that when the Environment Agency first started trying to eliminate such sources of pollution, it found that there was a whole Harrogate hotel and a gentlemen’s club whose toilet and sink waste was flowing straight into the beck.
He added that when large causes of pollution were remedied, smaller causes often came to light in their absence. Pollution at one outfall at Truro Road was remedied when a misconnected washing machine was identified.
High levels of ammonia pollution at the Jennyfield Drive outfall were traced recently to commercial premises nearby.
Mr Duncan said:
This pipework [flowing into Oak and Bilton becks] is probably the oldest part of Low Harrogate’s sewerage system, but also the most complicated, the most difficult, and the most expensive to put right.
It’s going to take time. I’ve still got about 20 years left of my career, and I think this is probably what I’ll be doing for most of it.
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