Yorkshire Water hit with £350k sewage leak fine
18 Aug 2016
Yorkshire Water has been handed a £350,000 fine after sewage was illegally discharged into Rud Beck and the River Crimple in Harrogate.
The company pleaded guilty to the offence, which took place in April 2013, and was sentenced at Bradford Crown Court on Wednesday 17 August.
Yorkshire Water was also ordered to pay costs of £30,000 to the Environment Agency (EA), which brought the case.
The impact of this discharge would have been significantly less if the telemetry had been working properly or if Yorkshire Water had detected the increase in the telemetry levels and responded sooner
Environment agency spokesman
Initially, Yorkshire Water had made the EA aware of a blockage in a sewer overflow near Sherwood Drive. However, investigations revealed that sewage had been discharging from the overflow for more than three days before the report was made on 15 April 2013.
A spokesman for the Environment Agency said: “Sewage overflows of this type can be used for discharging effluent into a watercourse, but only in storm situations when water flows are too high for the sewerage system to cope with the increased volume of water. Storm conditions were not present at the time of this incident and untreated sewage entered the beck for 87 hours causing significant pollution affecting over five kilometres of Rud Beck and the Crimple.
“It is not uncommon for foreign objects to enter a sewer and cause blockages and this is why telemetry is so important. The impact of this discharge would have been significantly less if the telemetry had been working properly or if Yorkshire Water had detected the increase in the telemetry levels and responded sooner.”
EA's investigation also revealed that Yorkshire Water was unable to respond to the leak sooner because its telemetry alarm system, which is used to alert the company to discharges, had been malfunctioning since 15 March 2013.
Yorkshire Water did not reset the alarm following a previous alarm on 16 March, and failed to detect an increase in the telemetry levels on 12 April, EA said.
Yorkshire Water has since upgraded its telemetry system and has also introduced a clear escalation procedure for responding to apparent contradictions in the system, the court heard.
Earlier this year Yorkshire Water was fined a record £1.1million for a pump failure in 2013 that caused pollution to flow into the River Ouse near York.
