On June 27, 2011 there were two spills from Station Road sewage pumping station at Perranporth when crude sewage was discharged into the Bolingey stream only a short distance from Perranporth beach.
The illegal discharges followed a pump failure at an adjoining sewage pumping station at Droskyn that receives sewage from the Perranporth area via the Station Road site before pumping it forward for treatment.
South West Water staff discovered a mechanical failure had caused the duty pump to stop working and that the standby pump was partially blocked and not operating at full capacity. This had caused flows at Station Road to back-up and sewage to be discharged into the Bolingey stream.
South West Water didn’t alert the Agency until some 12 hours after the first spill by which time it was impossible to assess the environmental impact of the spills as the discharges had stopped. The company’s site supervisor claimed it would have taken too long to get tankers to Perranporth to tanker the sewage away and that the pumps would have been repaired by the time they arrived.
‘South West Water had sufficient advance warning to put the necessary measures in place to prevent these discharges occurring. These could have included tankering away sewage from this site that only has limited storage capacity. Its failure to reduce the rising levels of sewage resulted in an avoidable spillage of crude sewage to a high profile bathing beach on a fine summer’s day,’ said Andrew Blewett for the Environment Agency.
Appearing before Truro magistrates, South West Water was fined £7,500 and ordered to pay £1,850 costs after pleading guilty to discharging a poisonous, noxious or polluting matter to an inland freshwater without a permit, an offence under the Environmental Permitting Regulations 2010.
The water company has now had to pay almost £30,000 in fines for pollution after it received a £20,000 fine on 16 April for discharging poor quality effluent into the Tamar Estuary.
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