The Rivers are Running Dry

Did anyone read the two recent articles in the Mail by Max Hastings and Trevor Grove.
Its not just here the rivers are running dry but worldwide with both Nile and Zambezi.
In France 2005 received half its annual rainfall,in England 19000 tons of water per day are being abstracted from the Kennet. Southern Water is seeking a licence to divert 4.5 million tons of water from the Medway,the list goes on so much so i wanted to slash my wrist after reading the articles.
I first noticed something was going wrong around 1990 when i managed to get a local farmer prosecuted for abstracting water 24hours a day and effecting the river levels and wildlife on my local rivers Ryton and Idle both are which now are a shadow of their former self

Sorry Zambesi wrong spelling

John,

Part of the problem is that the demand for water continues to rise. Here in Dorset if all the houses being forced on this part of the country by Prescott get built we will simply run out of water within a decade. That is despite substantial investment in building new reservoirs (something barely conceivable in this area 30 years ago as the water was simply abstracted from the ground) and the building of new pipelines to get water from the Avon to the Stour valley. What is slightly better news is that abstraction is being reversed on some of the more vulnerable rivers around here like the Allen and Piddle yet despite this the Tarrant keeps drying up in early autumn.

There is a strong argument that lack of sustainable water resource should be vetoing the growth of housing in the dryier parts of the country.

One of the best renewable ways of getting extra fresh water to Southern England is to use Reverse Osmosis De-salination. The energy for this can be obtained from Wind Farms.

Ron,

Given the current reaction to proposed wind farms in parts of beautiful Dorset, and the feelings about the unelected, unwanted, unaccountable SW Regional assembly and its decisions being thrust upon us without a vote, and Prescott's part in all this let's just say that a wind turbine would get rather forcibly inserted into a part of Prescott's anatomy if he had the courage to turn up in these parts.

The SE of England is in deep trouble as far as water supply is concerned. Although progress has been made on metering the water supply companies would rather we used more rather than less, and doesn't seem to be that keen on stopping the leaks. The dredging/drainage work of the last 50 years (more runoff, less soaking in) doesn't help though nature has reversed some of its impact. I am not convinced that the quantity of water available through desalination would do the job, especially as it would need to be networked acros the entire region. Though I believe that serious consideration is being given doing this in the Thames corridor region. One concern I have, rightly or wrongly, is that desalinated water is PURE rather than of similar chemical composition to the local ground water, and therefore might it have an effect on the rivers when discharged via sewers? This is a similar concern to major water transfer systems whereby acidic mountain water from say Wales might have an impact if it was discharged into the Thames, for example.

The very fact that water is heavy stuff to pump around makes the desal plants expensive even though i would like to see them.
I keep hearing the same argument i pay for the water so i will use as much as i want which is like saying i pay for refuse collection so i will drop as much litter as i want.
Mark Prescott is a complete waste of space and i feel sorry for the people down south with his building proposals

I fish the Medway regularly and know all about it (I've complained about it enough on the Barbel forum) but what can we do? The EA -bless them- spent last summer raping the south bank of my local stretch so to enable water to flow downstream more quickly so as to avert the risk of flooding local towns!!. All they ended up doing was destroying natural habitat (flora) and charged me for the privilege. As a result of this and 18 months without any real rain the levels have been lower than in a dry summer pretty much since late 2004. Southern Water have zero interest in capturing what water actually does fall from the sky and instead only want to meter people rather than do something long term -like build new reservoirs. It's a disgrace but solutions are not easy to come by.

Mark. I've got a nuclear powerstation near me (at Dungeness in Kent). I'll trade you all the wind farms you want and you can have the glow in the dark Cod.

It is all very worrying.

What I don'tunderstand though is that the water table in London is rising (true - my employer's recently spent an arm & a leg re-tanking the basement in our HQ) so why isn't the water pumped out from beneath London instead of abstracting from rivers?

Also if a river is kept clean and pure then it is possible to absract nearer to where the river enters the sea.

De-salination is the only answer I believe and I know you will all say it is too expensive. The fat cats can afford it and so can the share holders, are they so blinkered they can't see it coming? It amazes me they aren't planning for the future, things aint gonna get better, it will only get worse! Mother nature isn't going to change all of a sudden and give us lashings of rain.

We live on a friggin island surrounded by water, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to work it out. "They" have to bite the bullet and accept it!

Apart from the increased demand for water the main reason for low water tables has been the flood prevention programmes in use because of the building of towns, housing and industrial estates on flood plains.
Swollen rivers now no longer spill over into these areas with the result that water tables are not being replenished and the building of large reservoirs by damming rivers, such as the Severn, only increases the problem.
I was living in Downton, Wilts. when the Avon below Salisbury was dredged and its banks raised to drain the water meadows as far down as Fordingbridge. Many of the locals, including Tom Williams, had serious doubts about the wisdom of this action and a few years later their doubts were realised. During a long hot summer the river stopped flowing and almost dried up completely something it had never done in living memory. During the previous winter and early spring there had been average rainfall but all the flood water had simply run off to sea, although it had flooded through Somerly and Ringwood but the watertable above Fordingbridge was estimated to have dropped by more than 5 feet. There was no ground water to keep the flow going and the fish kill was horrendous.
Flood prevention is now practiced across most of Europe and in some areas of Asia and it is these countries, including Britain, that are now suffering.

Interesting comment re the windfarms - v - nuclear. If Dungeness is 2000 MW, and the really big wind turbines are 2mw each, you would need 1000 windfarms to replace it. Bearing in mind they need to be spaced (i.e not in a long line), where in Kent would you put 1000 windfarms??

Desal plants are a possibility for the water shortages, but they have thier own impacts, and large storage reservoirs could also work but take up valuable space in an already crowded country.

Fixing the leaks sounds like a good idea - even if it is expensive!

I live in East Sussex. You can fill Kent with them for all I care and if any or all of them blow up I won't lose any sleep over it. What I don't want is a visible mushroom cloud in my manor.

Desalination is very common through many countries of the world, especially the Middle East and parts of Africa.

RO membranes are so good these days thay are capable of getting at the salt alone, not necessarily the other dissolved mineral content of the water. In any event, the water would be pumped into large reservoirs where oxygen will be absorbed.

The energy required for RO filtration is mainly that to produce the pressure to force the water through the spirally wound semi-permeable membranes.

Take an Island like Malta for example. All their drinking water is supplied from RO plants. Take a city such as Windhoek in Namibia where it hardly rains. A large amount of the water comes from RO and is then re-cycled from the sewage works.

And as far as energy goes, Koeberg Nuclear Powerstation has been supplying electricity to the SA Eskom grid since about 1980 with no problems at all. Cooling water is taken from the sea and returned there. The area next to Koeberg is solid with fish.

A tremendous amount of freshwater is deposited into the sea from our rivers. This is where the water must be taken from, not from the upper reaches or the aquifers!

It's time that this country started looking at the rest of the world in terms of water management and treatment. In this field alone we are far behind many other countries. This is because for many years, we have considered the availabilty of cheap water as almost a right.

I visit the Aquatech Exibition every year in Amsterdam. What always strikes me is the dearth of British companies in the field of advanced water treatment and conservation at this exhibition. And further, I supply speciality USA manufactured water treatment products to the European market. Why is it, I wonder, that 90% of my business comes from countries like Italy, France, Spain and Greece?

Which ever way you look at it, it's about money, the fat cats and shareholders should take a large hit!

Its' a good point you have made regarding leaks Stuart.

I heard a paper presented some time ago where the compiler had calculated that over 25% of the water supplied to London was lost in leakages and ancient reticulation systems. He then went on to point out that if only ?10 was added to the average annual bill of the South East water consumer, 90% of the leaks could be fixed.

Apparently nothing was done!

We Brits certainly have a cavalier attitude to water,we always think its going to be available but this summer some are in for an almighty shock. Its like the bank account pay youself too much and it empties

John,
Back in '76 with the worst drought we've had the Bournemouth and West Hants refused to put a hosepipe ban on though Wessex Water did. One morning at Longham, the main draw point on the Stour for B&WH water I was fishing when the pumps increased intake. The Stour flowed backwards! Yet the water company claimed that water was only taken from the substrata gravel not the river a few feet away. They are building reservoirs now at Longham.

I wonder whether there should be more water transfer using canals/pumping stations. There is a issue re water quality. Back in 1990 (a hot dry summer), fishing the Witham in August, we were surprised at the colour and steady flow (expecting it to be clear and stopped), and found out it was due to water being transferred via the Fossdyke from the Trent to the Witham so that the farmers could continue to use the Witham for crop irrigation. So could similar schemes work to transfer water from the Severn via the Severn & Thames canal to the Thames, or the K&A canal to get water from the lower Avon to the Kennet, and help Oxford, Swindon, Reading etc?

Two very important questions here.

Why would anyone in their right mind want to use a hosepipe?

Why do we have these ridiculous car wash systems in Britain. They waste enormous volumes of water?

Mark
You possibly know more anout the transfer of water than i do but a grid scheme is still used up our end from Kilder.
One problem it caused was the release of water had a dramatic impact on the fishing with low temp water entering the river and also different quality.
The Wharfe has suffered terribly due to abstraction and will continue to do so.I will never ever buy a dishwasher water the lawn in summer and i would only ever use a recycle car wash.
What i did not know was the fact that 1kilo of rice needs up to 5000litres of water and cotton needs enormous amounts of water to grow. The old washing machine used up to 70galls of water a cycle and we in Britain average 150litrers a day America as much as 400litres.
One has to ask that now China is becoming more westernised what impact this will have