Water Privatisation: Dumping sewage isn't just harming our ecology, it's harming us.

Water Privatisation has led to dirty rivers, filthy coasts & none of the sewage dumped evaporates. It keeps doing harm. As far as water privatisation goes, perhaps the one thing that has offended people more than any other, even across the political spectrum has been the dumping of sewage into our rivers and seas. This period of extremely dry weather has seen not just our reservoirs drop, but our river levels too as water is lost through evaporation, but all that sewage? That doesn’t evaporate. Not only have our rivers and coasts become some of the dirtiest in Europe, but that sewage is now becoming more concentrated. This isn’t just a disaster from our perspective, but from an ecological perspective too, with our wildlife everywhere threatened and river resources we also use being impacted. The River Wye as an example has a significant salmon population, but during last month’s heatwave river levels became so severe, Natural Resource Wales made the decision to open a reservoir up to bring the river level up and save the fish. Well here we are again, another heatwave, the reservoirs levels haven’t exactly recovered so what do they do this time? It’s a similar story everywhere. Let’s take the Thames. For the first time in my lifetime, the source of the Thames near Ashton Keynes has dried up. It’s a much smaller river there, it’s still flowing in London where it becomes far larger, numerous tributaries feed it further down, meaning the effective source right now has moved. Of course the Thames is abused in other ways too, with Thames Water having dumped 2 billion litres of raw sewage into the Thames across 2 days in 2020. Of course when rain returns, that can still cause pollution problems that have been allowed to pervade. There is nothing illegal about sewage entering watercourses should sewage systems be overwhelmed. We’ve seen chronic floods in recent years, we’ve seen this happen more and more. Where it is dry now, agricultural waste that enters water systems currently isn’t, but when rain comes again, there’s that much more sat there to damage the ecology once again. But there are direct threats to our health from all this sewage too. Polio is back, with cases being picked up in London. A disease verging on being completely eradicated is back, kids are now being vaccinated against it again, but where did it come from? It was detected in the sewage. Our ecology, our own health, our access to water, the health of our rivers and streams, all have become secondary to the profits of private water companies. On these measures alone, never mind the financial savings, water must be renationalised.