A water company has blamed seagull pollution for the state of a beach.
A drop in water quality in the sea off Southsea seafront is down to leaky sewers and seagull poo they claim.
Southern Water says it’s trying to figure out the cause – but they don’t think it’s caused by sewage discharges.
Fined
In 2021 the water firm was fined a record £90 million for dumping raw sewage into the sea at 17 sites along the Kent, Sussex, Hampshire and the Isle of Wight coasts.
A spokesman for Southern Water said: ‘Seagulls are roosting under the pier which can be a problem.
‘We have to speciate the E.coli; by looking at the samples we can find out the type of animal source it comes from.’
In response, anti-pollution campaigner and musician Feargal Sharkey tweeted: “Well I’m glad that’s been cleared up. Now I can stop talking about shite and go back to talking about music. Happy days.”
Seagull poo
Well, it seems that Seagulls can’t be blamed for everything, so Feargal won’t be picking up the guitar any time soon.
He has since tweeted: “River Wye is dying, a few days ago we find out @EnvAgency & @NFUtweets secretly agreed not to enforce the Farming Rules for Water then we discover they also voted to make discussions at the Wye Catchment Nutrient Management Board private. Supported by; @WUFoundation. Christ!!!”
Anglian water
And just to add insult to injury Anglian Water customers will be surprised to hear that CEO (Peter Simpson) met his environmental bonus targets last year and was awarded a £302,000 personal bonus (on top of his £575,000 salary), in 2022.
This is what Private Eye had to say about him in their most recent issue.
WINNER of Private Eye’s Turd of the Week is… Anglian Water chief executive Peter Simpson, whose company was fined £150,000 at the end of June for discharging sewage into Bedfordshire’s River Til.
Anglian contractors tried to unblock a sewer with water jets, overwhelming a treatment centre and pouring sewage into the river.
As with other water companies, years of under-investment have not helped Anglian Water’s performance. This January it was fined £560,000 for a fish-killing discharge of raw sewage in Northamptonshire; and in May it was fined a whopping £2.65m for a major sewage leak in 2018. The penalty was so large, said a district judge, because “Anglian finds itself in court so frequently”.
Related: Video of sewage goes viral as salary package of water boss revealed
