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.
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