London’s new £5bn super sewer has been fully connected and is already stopping half a million tonnes of sewage from entering the River Thames, the firm behind it has said.
After 10 years of construction work, the last of the 21 connections of the Thames Tideway Tunnel was made to the city’s Victorian sewage system.
The 16-mile (25km) pipe will divert 34 of the most-polluting sewage outflows that have been discharging into the Thames.
Tideway chief executive Andy Mitchell said: “This is another significant step forward – with this final connection complete, the super sewer is fully up and running and protecting the Thames.”
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Where does it go, will it be processed or just dumped further away from London?
It goes to the existing sewage treatment plant at Beckton.
London was dumping raw sewage into the Thames? What the actual fuck? What is wrong with Britain, that’s not okay.
Our sewer systems were too old to handle too much rain water, so when it rained heavily, the sewers overflowed into the Thames. Which was intentional, insofar as it’s better than overflowing into the streets, but obviously not ideal.
That’s disgusting. This isn’t 1895 anymore, and if I’m reading the article right, they still plan to dump raw sewage into the Thames? Just less of it?
Bright side, I now have a come back whenever someone brings up school shootings.
I’m quite certain it happens in the US, too! My understanding is that it’s a normal part of sewage systems to let them overflow into either rivers or the sea. If they get overwhelmed - and any system can get overwhelmed in extreme circumstances - the extra stuff needs to go somewhere, and as I said above it’s better for it to go into a river than for it to back up into the streets!
Obviously small amounts of poo (human or animal) end up in rivers all the time so there’s a certain amount that the rivers can sort of naturally handle without becoming excessively polluted.
We don’t, or at least not by the sewer design. Sure, hurricanes and tornadoes can and have destroyed treatment facilities, but that’s not the same thing as intentionally designing for any amount of sewage to enter the waterways.
You’re just not paying attention. Here is the EPA map of where Combined Sewer Outflows happen.
As you can see, it’s hundreds of American communities, including major cities like New York, Chicago, DC, San Francisco, Seattle.
The US is a massive country friend, there are lots of places with combined sewers (domestic wastewater and stormwater) that will bypass treatment when there is a big rain event, especially in coastal cities that discharge wastewater to the ocean. It’s not ideal but the alternative is massively oversized treatment plants or replacing all of the existing sewer infrastructure to separate the sewers. Both options would cost tens of billions of dollars in any of the large east coast cities. People are not willing to pay for that.
