OUT IN THE FIELD: Annemarie Field – You can’t put glitter on a piece of raw sewage

Everyone makes mistakes. I get that. And the Lord himself knows I have made a few. But the latest faux pas at Poo Castle, the Southern Water waste treatment works in Langney Point, has raised the bar quite considerably. Last Saturday morning, something went very, very wrong at the site and due to a complete power failure, millions of litres of untreated urine and faeces were allowed to flow out into the sea from the outfall pipes where treated matter is normally disposed of. That’s a lot of “untreated material” which then promptly made its way with the tide back onto the beaches and prompted a warning to bathers not to swim because of “sewage pollution”. While all this was going on Southern Water hastily arranged for some power to be brought to the site and by the afternoon there were more generators than you could shake a stick at. We have been unable to ascertain exactly how many millions of litres of the stuff was making its way into the English Channel because Southern Water won’t tell us. It was the Environment Agency that informed the media it happened over a 10 hour period. I am not sure at what capacity the brown stuff was flowing on Saturday, but a similar leak at Worthing treatment works in 2017 saw 17 million litres of it pumped into the sea during a five hour period. That leak follows a similar incident at the same station back in 2012 when 40 million litres of sewage was released into the sea, leading to beaches along a 10-mile stretch to be closed for six days. Southern Water was prosecuted in that instance and fined £160,000 with £27,000 costs. In all, Southern, responsible for the public wastewater collection and treatment in not only Sussex but Hampshire, the Isle of Wight and Kent too, has been fined a record £126 million for sewage spills. And that’s not all. The water watchdog OFWAT found the company systematically covered up sewage spills between 2010 and 2017 and criticised “failings in corporate culture and governance”. And then it was revealed that during that