WATER MANAGEMENT
A BUSTED FLUSH – PART 1: THE FOLLY OF WATER PRIVATISATION In the game of poker a busted flush may refer to four cards of a suit followed by a card of a different suit. Such circumstances would arise when a string of clubs is broken by the appearance of, for example, the Queen of Hearts. In 1865 the Reverend Charles Dodgson, aka Lewis Carroll a mathematics tutor at Oxford, wrote ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland’ commonly known as ‘Alice in Wonderland’ in which, as the ruler of Wonderland, the Queen of Hearts becomes a source of conflict. The Queen never actually executes anyone she sentences to death and her power lies in rhetoric, thus reinforcing the view that she is ‘devoid of moral substance’. The UK Water Services Regulation Authority (Ofwat), the body responsible for economic regulation of the privatised water and sewerage industry in England and Wales, recently determined that a privatised water company manipulated water samples and “deliberately misreported data for many years to avoid financial penalties.” This action led to members of its staff being convicted of obstructing data collection. In the first of two articles Chartered Engineers Professor Robert Jackson and Graham Olsen discuss the enormous threats to the natural environment posed by the privatised UK water industry which too appears ‘devoid of moral substance’. 30
ENERGY MANAGER MAGAZINE • MAY 2022
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wight D. Eisenhower, a five star General and 34th US President, once stated: “What is important is seldom urgent, and what is urgent is seldom important”. Today, the urgency and importance of the task in hand relates to agents that knowingly pollute invaluable natural waters and in so doing flagrantly disregard the law. The benefits accrued to public health since the beginning of the 19th Century through advances in civil engineering have been ‘systematically dismantled’ through water privatisation. So a question to be posed is ‘did privatisation of the water industry deal the environment a busted flush?’ The term ‘busted flush’ may be attributed to a number of scenarios. As stated above it may refer to four cards of a suit followed by a card of a different suit. Alternatively it can refer to something or someone that began an action successfully but later failed, or to storm-water discharges permitted by a water company but which subsequently create havoc and pollution from a first flush event within a sewerage network. There has been much recent publicity regarding the adverse nature of storm sewage discharges into UK watercourses that continue to be attributed to water companies’ sewerage networks and their wastewater treatment works. This begs a number of searching questions. Why is this the case in the UK in 2022? What is occurring more than 30 years after the introduction of legislation that created the privatised water companies and defined what they might be permitted to discharge under EU legislation now enshrined into UK law? Over many centuries human health has been intrinsically linked to advances in medicine and sanitary engineering so before any of the above questions can be answered it is prudent to examine the history of wastewater collection, conveyance and treatment. It is estimated that the first sewers were constructed in ancient Rome around 500 BC when the city’s sanitation became well advanced compared to that of other ancient cities. At that time residents were served by an extensive water supply from a series of aqueducts, and from sanitation services provided by a complex system of sewers much like modern sewers that transported human sewage, flushed from latrines, into nearby rivers or streams. Over time, the Romans expanded the network of sewers that ran through the city and linked most of these to the Cloaca Maxima, Latin for Greatest Sewer, which emptied into the Tiber River. In the 1980’s a modern form of this system was replicated in a major UK city, Liverpool, through the introduction of the Mersey Estuary Pollution Alleviation Scheme (MEPAS) to protect a river with the second highest tidal range in Britain. It was Liverpool in 1846 that introduced its own Sanitary Act which resulted in the appointment of the world’s first City Engineer and the first purpose-designed comprehensive sewerage system. However, around the same period nearly every home in London had a cesspit beneath it together with the associated foul and deadly odours and it was not
