Letter from Katy

LETTER FOR PUBLICATION

Dear Editor,

Regarding the thousands of dead and dying fish in the River Lea and Lee Navigation recently, whilst it is true that in hot weather river-water cannot hold as much dissolved oxygen as when it is cold, this mass killing of fish did not happen in other rivers in the south-east of England, which had the same unusually high period of warm weather.

It is obvious that the heat alone cannot have been the cause, and that the River Lea in the southern part of the Lea Valley suffers from quite unusual problems. As Theo Thomas of Thames21's "Love the Lea" campaign group has put it: "the Lea is a river at risk"; and his colleague Damian Rafferty said: "The River Lea is on its last gasp."

Even before the heavy rain that ended the heatwave after a two-week drought, causing combined sewer overflows to pollute the river even further, the Lea was suffering badly from pollution. A major cause is the many houses built along the riverside during the Victorian period, when no distinction was made in the sewerage system between polluting sewage from homes and factories and storm-water from the streets. Even where more modern systems have been put in place, misconnections to the wrong sewer (although illegal) are still unfortunately common. This means that even at the best of times the Lea suffers from an unusual amount of domestic sewage flowing straight into it.

On top of that, as the country's second-longest navigable river, the Canals and Rivers Trust is obliged to maintain a minimum depth of water in the River Lea and Lea Navigation between Hertford and Limehouse. When the flow of water is low in the many tributaries that feed into the upper Lea, the Environment Agency can be called upon to sanction the release of partially treated sewage from the treatment works by Deepham's Lock. Add in the heavily-polluted Moselle Brook, which flows into the Lea at Tottenham Locks, and the wonder is that any fish survive at all!

A huge amount of water is abstracted from the river system at Chingford for treatment as drinking water, and this means that below Tottenham Locks the river-water in summer can be around four-fifths untreated sewage. Happy canoeing, guys!

And storm-water ain't what it used to be either. Whilst organically decomposable horse-droppings might once have made their way into the Victorian run-off system, today all sorts of substances pollute the run-off. People unthinkingly empty tins of dirty oil, unwanted paint and all sorts of other chemicals into street drains, or flick cigarette butts in them. Hard surfaces such as roads, car-parks and driveways are covered in a chemical cocktail of petrol, oil and polluted dust, which all gets washed off whenever it rains. The more hard surfacing there is the more quickly rainwater floods off and into the storm-water drains and combined sewers, causing more overflows from the combined sewers which predominantly carry waste from toilets but are also laced with cooking oil, domestic detergents, and cleaning products.

To my horror, last week the Government's ever-barmier Communities Secretary, Eric Pickles, suggested that hard-up people should try to make ends meet by turning their front gardens into car-parks! As anyone with any environmental knowledge could tell you, rainwater percolates slowly through garden soil, watering plants on its way, and obviously rather than concreting more gardens over we should be encouraging people to do the very opposite!

Yours truly,

Katy Andrews.

Walthamstow E17.