Another fin clipped fish today. 15lbs from Upper Bigswier;
 Check the The Wye Salmon Association site for a picture.



Some of you in the Hay on Wye area, and probably elsewhere, may recall the torrential storm around mid day on Tuesday when the heavens opened and dumped a high volume of water very quickly on the surrounding area.   Below is information and pictures of what resulted from an angler on the river at the time..  Raw sewage entering the river presumably because the local sewage works was overloaded with water. As the writer found out if this happens, or indeed when there are other problems such as elictricty failure or some other problem, Welsh Water are allowed, perfectly legally, to discharge it to the local watyercourse whilst attempting to remove the solids.
Many people are not aware of this but its a fact throughout the catchment which is not being addressed.  RWGA have highlighted this to the authourties over the years but nothing has veer been done.  There are hundred of discharge licences being approved over the catchment each year, large and small, from most of the tributaries and the main river.  When the discharge licences were advertised in the London gazette we used to object to every one. None I am aware of were ever turned down though in some cases they may have been modified.  EA no longer have to publish these proposed discharges, or abstraction applications, so we no longer have the means to object.  Convenient that!

Its a fact that local authorities, Welsh Water and industry in general  are still, even in 2015, big polluters of our waterways.  Mostly it goes unnoticed as general rainfall results in a spate and the resultant discharges are unseen and usually sufficiently diluted. However in times of low flow a local thunderstorm, as happened on the Thames some years ago which resulted in a massive fish kill, , can result in large volumes of untreated sewage entering the watercourse which may be at low summer level, as in this case.  There is no doubt too that in times of spate many sewage works, already operating at maximum level, take the chance to flush out their systems
As usual EA and NRW work hand in glove on these discharge licences so draw your own conclusions.
WUF wring their hands at siltation but do nothing, as far as I know, about these sort of discharges, treated or not, yet try and tell us how much water quality has improved having fenced off miles of streams.  Cattle shouldn't crap in the Wye but humans can by the hundreds of thousands apparently.
Still never let facts get in the way of a good story or in this case a fairy tale.

The real problem is no one will do anything until there is a fish kill of some magnitude and even then EA are reluctant to act.   Is your river safe in the hands of any of these organisation - not by a long way it's not

"Was fishing on the Warrington AA stretch of River Wye below Hay bridge this morning when there was an absolutely torrential storm for about an hour. After it subsided I noticed a grey streak in the middle of the river, after a while I started to smell sewage. Decided to investigate upstream and found the Hay sewage pumping station was pouring out untreated sewage water straight into the river, grey water which stank of sewage. Rang the EA emergency number plus Welsh Water at 12.40 they turned up at 14.15 needless to say it was all over by then. I was rather shocked to discover that this is all perfectly OK and within Environment Agency guidelines to discharge raw sewage water directly into a river at times of flash floods, the water apparently goes through a metal grid with 5mm diameter holes to remove solids. It would probably pass unnoticed if the river was in flood but not in these low water conditions. Just because something is legal or "within guidelines" doesn't make it right, this needs to be stopped asap!!"