Water outages

[Woody girl]

I do miss being able to collect well water when I lived in Glastonbury and Totnes.
Nothing like that round here, but my friend has a small stream that originates very close by running through her garden. I do prefer getting it at the source outlet though, then you know it's safer.
I'm trying to find out the water quality if my local river. I know they monitor it, just can't seem to contact the relevant person atm. Wondering why????

 

[Woody girl]

Wow, just had a call to direct me to an online report on water quality in the barle, which is a moorland river in a national park, flowing through no towns, so one would expect it to be relatively clean.
Oh no!
It's scary! Some statistics follow.

Barle polluted 264 times in 2023, lasting 2,015 hours

24 of 54 pharmaceuticals detected.
These include, but are not the end of the list,
Caffeine
Carbamazepine
Fexofenadine
Cetirizine
Anti depressants
Anti convulsions
Antimicrobial
Anti inflammatory
Substantial lipid regulators diabetes treatments

All sufficient to to contribute to antibiotic resistance, and negatively affect fish and other organisms.

Exford, upstream from me, has higher pollution levels than London, Belfast, Leeds and York.

Oh and downstream only 2 miles away, sulfadiazine which is an animal pharmaceutical.

Pollution is worse in summer, with lower water flow, and obviously influx of visitors using facilities.

I havnt checked out the exe yet.

Guess where I won't be getting my water from!

 

[Tengu]

Oh my goodness.

 

[Glow_worm]

Our poor bodies have so much background toxicity to deal with!

 

[Woody girl]

What's worse is that during the summer , when there is low flow, and an upping of these things due to an influx of visitors,... adults wild swim,... kids swim and paddle, ...as do dogs, (shedding toxic flea treatments in to the water) in this toxic soup.
Frankly, I'm appalled. This is a national park, and meant to be a natural wild area, and there are more toxins in the water than London Leeds Belfast and York. All large conurbations.
Moral....don't go to a national park, and pass body fluids if you are on meds!!!!!!

 

[slowworm]

Wow, just had a call to direct me to an online report on water quality in the barle, which is a moorland river in a national park, flowing through no towns, so one would expect it to be relatively clean.

Did you get any indication of how the pollutants entered the river? It's very common for sewage sludge from water treatment works to be spread on the fields so, along with the more obvious pollutants, I wouldnt trust a countryside river.

 

[Glow_worm]

And we only seem to be at the very beginning of the curve of addresing this.

 

[Toddy]

It's scary just what we end up putting into the watercourses from our pharmaceuticals.

We need to do better at degrading all that stuff before it hits the main waters, which means we really need to upgrade our sewerage facitilies.

 

[demented dale]

I’d go here. Sacred Well of The Virgin Mary, Byworth. An ancient healing well, apparently the water is good for eye problems. It’s about 1/4 mile away from where I live and I drink it almost daily. Still have to wear glasses though.

View attachment 92238

That looks like opposite leave golden saxifrage growing, Do a forage while you are at it x

 

[Woody girl]

Did you get any indication of how the pollutants entered the river? It's very common for sewage sludge from water treatment works to be spread on the fields so, along with the more obvious pollutants, I wouldnt trust a countryside river.

It's mostly moorland with wild roaming sheep and ponies, not agricultural in the main, so sludge doesn't go on the area.
I reckon it's due to lack of investment in sewerage stations, not being upgraded, as they are too small to be worth the effort, and all those "discharges" which should be illigal and fined.. we all know where water company profits go don't we? Not on the infrastructure. They rarely get fined either.
Look at the info in my first post on this, on the number of illegal discharges into the river.... I cannot find any legal action indicated.
Maybe this is something we can do, .. lobby the relevant authorities to prosecutethese illegal discharges, and ban them from hiking water rates to pay for it. Take it out of their shareholder pot.

 

[Laurentius]

I dread to think what is in our local river, mostly toxic run offs from farms and the local roads I would think. It was associated with a local Polio outbreak back in the 50's there is a Pathe video about it on YouTube somewhere. The Council put up some no swimming notices a while back, but I do not think that anyone would seriously entertain the idea of swimming there.

 

[Nice65]

Its a lovely well but haven't you clean water closer?

Not if there’s an outage. To be honest, and to answer @British Red, I’d go get in the camper van and drive somewhere where there is potable water. I’ve got an 80l tank for washing and showering, and could boil it for drinking.

I like the little spring/well, it’s got a nice feel to it. It’s a proper wishing well, there’s a coin tree a bit further up and often I find little offerings, some berries, or some incense burning nearby.

 

[British Red]

Not if there’s an outage. To be honest, and to answer @British Red, I’d go get in the camper van and drive somewhere where there is potable water. I’ve got an 80l tank for washing and showering, and could boil it for drinking.

That makes sense. I recall someone once telling me they would carry water home - a 25L Jerry can in each hand for a mile