Dear Gurn,
Re the Good Beach Guide:
The very wet spells we had last summer did trigger a number of sewer system emergency overflows. These functioned as designed, preventing the sewer system backing up into people's homes. Emergency overflows are regulated by the environment agency (SEPA) and generally discharge dilute, screened waste water, not raw sewage.
As for the treatment works at Nairn, it treats sewage to produce a high quality effluent - a clear water which is dispersed way out in the Moray Firth and nowhere near the beaches. And I can assure your reader interested in the impact of extra housing that this will not reduce the quality of the finished clear water.
One of your correspondents makes the very apt point that during bad weather all sorts of 'diffuse pollution' (run off from the countryside) enters the river and is washed out to sea. If you look at the samples taken by SEPA off Nairn last summer (posted on their website and at the noticeboards by the harbour and the links) you'll see they were all 'excellent' or 'good'.
It might be of interest to your readers that Scottish Water recently gave evidence to the Scottish Parliament's flooding bill, suggesting that the best way to improve the sewer system's ability to cope with the sudden downpours we're seeing more of is to remove surface water connections from the system. We encourage developers to install rainwater recycling systems and would like to see more green roofs and car parks with porous surfaces.
I hope this information is useful to Gurnites. Keep up the good work with your superb blog.
Jason Rose.
Scottish Water & Nairn Resident!
5 comments:
His head must be spinning again.I wonder where it could end up.?
The Gurnmeister suspects that anon is referring to previous comments such as this from Jason himself on the Hi-Arts site.
N: I imagine it entailed a fair amount of work on top of your regular job as a press officer at Scottish Water?
JR: A lot of people do say that to me, and being a spin-doctor by trade I try to play it down a bit! I say oh, well, it’s an e-mail here and a phone call there, and so it is, but that all adds up, and at certain points in the year it takes over and I basically don’t have any spare time at all. Dealing with authors and publishers and all of the people involved in it can be a bit like herding cats, and things can also change at the last minute.
The full interview with Jason can be read here.
Jason, nice to hear your assurances but…..(there’s always a but) would the current sewage works cope with all the possible proposals of additional housing (let’s pretend that Sandown for instance went ahead) in the Nairn area? For example, what is the capacity of the current tertiary sewage system and the holding tanks?
Wow! Mr Rose lives in Nairn.That's
fine.He will be able to see and smell it for himself,the next time we get a deluge into the river.
Anon, to be fair to Scottish Water they have made considerable investment along the River in recent years. And just how could you completely eliminate the storm overflows in the town centre, bulldoze the whole town and start again?
Having said that it is a scary sight when you see the river changing colour to a sludgy grey colour.
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