One (bad) idea ...

I located the e-mail sent mentioned in the post below this.

 'One idea being mooted is the creation of a New Ouseburn Interceptor for Sewage Effluent (NOISE). The logic of this is that a piecemeal approach to solving the sewage outflow problem will not be sufficient. Fifty years ago, a friend of mine, Nog O’Rorke, was in charge of building the new interceptor sewer along the north bank of the Tyne, which was supposed to solve Newcastle’s sewage problems. Well, time and development have caught up with us and Newcastle’s sewage needs a fresh approach. The most logical route for NOISE is buried under the existing banks of the Ouseburn and creating a new covered channel underneath the Stadium. This would bypass the existing Ouseburn culvert, which has been there for over 100 years and we have no information about its present or future condition. Does anyone?

However, just bunging our sewage into the Tyne instead of the Ouseburn is not a permanent solution and the possibility of rescuing the organic components of human sewage is tantalising in this age of renewables. If this was done, then a state of the art sewage works in the Stadium could produce up to 100,000 tonnes of clean, healthy, organic fertiliser each year.'

Where does one start with such an idea? By ignoring the locals that's how.

Just the place for a sewage works?

Sludgefield?

The Ouseburn in thoughtful mood

 

A slightly disturbing idea that has been mooted to solve the chronic sewage pollution issue that is inflicted on the Ouseburn – see previous post. I am reluctant to criticise people who have done much to raise the profile of the key problem affecting our local waterway, but fear I must.

There needs to be serious (and expensive) engineering to solve the present conditions; heavy rainfall is dealt with by the same pipework that conveys sewage and waste water. When I write 'dealt with' I mean dumped. The risk of sewage plus rainwater backing up into homes or onto streets is too graphic. So 'outfalls' to cope with storm flows – sudden, and violent – dumps the excess into the nearest river. Hence the entire U.K. (mostly England) now faces the unhappy fact that its numerous streams and rivers are polluted to a greater or lesser extent with human waste. Hold on, you 'wild swimmers'. 

It has been just too convenient (pun intended) to use this cheap mechanism to side step improving at considerable cost, the combo of sewage and rainfall, money that would be paid out these days to shareholders.

One idea raised in discussions by the newly founded Ouseburn Way pressure group would be a pipeline running parallel (?) to the Ouseburn fetching up somewhere like the City Stadium (a.k.a. Battlefield) and into a new treatment works!

This stuck me as a very unwelcome idea. However, Newcastle has a fairly impressive track record for bad ideas becoming reality.

Since much of the most aggressive use of the 'now you see it, now you don't' technique applied to sewage occurs around the Benton district, a simpler solution (these puns just write themselves) would be somewhere higher up the Ouseburn route.

Massive house building along the upper route of the Ouseburn should have included new or modernised sewage and waste water management. It appears it hasn't, but I see no reason to visit this neglect on slowly improving Shieldfield and the Lower Ouseburn Valley. That really would be passing the dirty end of the stick to somewhere that thought its days of grime were long gone. Besides, a tunnel would be a hell of an undertaking and the foreign owners of Northumbrian Water would have to really have their arms twisted to fork up the cash required ... Not that I dismiss that in and of itself.

We await events.

Where there's muck ...

 The sad truth is that the key to cleaning up the Ouseburn, the stream that runs beneath the City Stadium (a.k.a. Battlefield) lies out side the reach of either the Newly formed Ouseburn group or the City Council. Investors in Northumbrian Water plc, a foreign owned company, expect a return on their cash and if that means this insignificant (to them at least) waterway is regularly flushed with raw sewage, so? Any fine issued by Ofwat, the official industry 'watchdog', if it materialised, would be relatively small, a mere 'cost of doing business', compared to the very large sums required re-engineer sewage disposal, sums that would impact dividends. You do know how this works, don't you?

The Guardian columnist George Monbiot explains.

I sincerely hope the new Ouseburn Initiative group inspired by the Reece Foundation achieves much. However, the insuperable obstacle will be how to enforce the one thing that would make a crucial difference: Water quality. Re-Nationalisation of the water companies – who have squeezed thousands of millions out of the consumer for less than stellar performance over pollution and systemic leaks – would seem to be the only real option.