Anglian Water has said there is “no room for complacency” after the company was fined £300,000 for a pollution incident in Essex that is thought to have led to the death of more than 5,000 fish.
The incident occurred at its Shenfield and Hutton Water Recycling Centre in June 2016. All three pumps in one of the pumping stations at the site were found too have failed following a fire, resulting in untreated sewage pouring out of an emergency overflow into the River Wid.
Tests carried out by officers from the Environment Agency (EA) revealed high levels of ammonia in the water, which appeared cloudy. In total, around 10 kilometres of the river experienced high levels of ammonia for three days.
The agency said that “at least 5,431 fish were found to have died during this time with invertebrates affected in almost 5 kilometres of the river”.
The fire is believed to have begun after the failure of a bearing on one of the pumps. The fire then spread to the cables powering the other two pumps, which rendered them all inoperable.
The EA’s investigation found that the pumps being used by Anglian Water were almost 40 years old. It was additionally revealed that the bearings on another of the three pumps had failed in 2013 and Anglian had subsequently sought funding to replace the bearings on the other two.
However, only two of the pumps had been refurbished when the incident took place in June 2016, with the other pump being the one that initially caught fire. All of the equipment has since been repaired by Anglian.
Appearing at Chelmsford Magistrates Court on 26 May, Anglian was fined £300,000 and ordered to pay costs of more than £61,000. The company had already plead guilty to causing an unpermitted pollution discharge at earlier hearing in September 2021.
The court found that whilst Anglian Water was on notice about the need for refurbishment, the fire was an unusual event and the chances of it being able to foresee a fire causing all 3 pumps to fail were low.
A spokesperson for the water company said: “Both the prosecution and defence experts said that a fire in these circumstances was very unusual and unforeseeable… District judge Timothy King found that as a company, we had an appropriate methodology in line with industry standards to operate the site.
“He said it was quite clear that there was an investment governance system in place that was working, and found that the offence was committed with little or no fault on the part of the company.”
The spokesperson added that although the company did install aerators in the river to restore oxygen supplies, “regrettably” there was a short lived impact to the river and a number of fish were killed.
The spokesperson noted that an EA survey conducted in 2017 showed an overall increase in the number of fish in the river when compared to before the event but said “any incident like this is distressing”.
They continued: “We operate more than 1,100 water recycling centres, 6,300 sewage pumping stations and a 40,000-mile sewer network across our region, and have never encountered anything similar.
“However, we know there’s no room for complacency, and we’re absolutely determined to improve further and progress towards achieving our zero pollutions goal.”
EA environment manager, Andrew Raine, said: “The fine handed to Anglian Water shows polluters are made to pay for damaging the environment.
“The fish population in this area suffered significantly because of this sewage pollution and it took time for the local ecosystem to recover.
“The public demand tough action when it comes to water quality and we are delivering. Anyone caught breaching environmental laws faces enforcement action, up to and including prosecution.”