A mother-of-two has recruited academics to test hundreds of water samples taken from near sewage outflow pipes on the Hampshire coast to collect data on the harm that storm discharges cause to human health and the environment.
Bianca Carr, 40, began a campaign against coastal pollution after watching her sons use discarded cotton buds to decorate sandcastles on the beach near their home in Emsworth, five miles east of Portsmouth.
Carr, whose husband sails on the Olympic champion Ben Ainslie’s America’s Cup team, said water companies and the Environment Agency only told the public the length of time of sewage discharges, not their chemical and bacterial content. To gather evidence she has recruited university academics to test hundreds of water samples being pumped by Southern Water into protected waters near the Solent.
She set up the Final Straw Foundation four years ago and has raised £13,000 to fund peer-reviewed research into water and crustacean samples taken from Chichester and Langstone harbours.
Both harbours are sites of special scientific interest and Chichester harbour is an area of outstanding natural beauty. They are home to wintering wildfowl and wading birds, as well as being used by fishermen, sailors, kite surfers and swimmers.
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The samples were taken in November when, according to Southern Water, untreated wastewater was dumped into Chichester harbour for 1,000 hours and into Langstone harbour for 350 hours.
Preliminary results found that E. coli levels from overflows in November were up to 760 times the threshold considered to be acceptable to public health. The bacteria can cause infection, diarrhoea and vomiting.
“The water companies and Environment Agency should be doing this testing and making it public,” Carr said. “They should know what the composition of the water coming out of their plants is.”
Under the guidance of the universities of Portsmouth and Brunel, Carr and her volunteers collected 300 samples from 15 locations.
Several E. coli readings were more than 1,000 colony-forming units (cfu) per 100ml, with one reading in Langstone harbour, near the outflow at Budds Farm, as high as 380,000 cfu/100ml — 760 times the failure rate set by the EU bathing water directive.
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The presence of E.coli is considered by scientists to be a proxy for the state of river and seawater, and an indicator for many other contaminants such as pharmaceuticals and pesticides.
“We have salt marshes and sea grasses here but it’s being catastrophically damaged,” Carr said. “We are killing off our natural pollution filters.”
Southern Water was fined a record £90 million in 2021 for deliberately dumping 16 billion litres of raw sewage into protected seas over several years for its own financial gain.
Nigh Gough, 68, an angler from Surrey who visits Langstone harbour, told The Times he has seen several sewage discharges. “It was all the detritus you might imagine,” he said.. “It’s just disgusting, I would never eat shellfish from the harbour.”
A local fishmonger, who did not want to be identified, said the sewage was “pushing fishermen further out to sea” to ensure their catch was not polluted.
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“The water quality in the harbour isn’t good enough to eat the shellfish anymore,” he said. “We have lost 70 per cent in terms of revenue because of that. It’s killing us.”
Toby Willison, the director of quality and environment at Southern Water, said the company was leading a working group to protect and improve the waters of Langstone and Chichester harbours, including with agriculture and harbour users who also had an impact on water quality.
“For our part, we are investing £2 billion (£1,000 per customer) between 2020 and 2025. Our major treatment works at Budds Farm is receiving a £22 million investment in increasing capacity and building additional storm tanks. At Chichester the wastewater treatment works have ultraviolet treatment on the outfall, while a new, large pipeline will take flows away from Chichester to be treated at Tangmere.”
He added that cutting storm releases “is not something we can do alone”.