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Industrial oil spill on the River Lea - help please


anniewhere

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Dear boaters and friends of our waterways,

On 11 February, lots of us and members of the public reported large amounts of used engine oil on the River Lea in East London. The response by the Environment Agency and the Canal & River Trust has been appalling. Too slow, bad communication between them and with boaters and the public...just to name a few. 

More than 5 weeks later, there is still a lot of oil on the river, and it's spreading further because CRT prematurely opened a lock again.

Together with the Swan Sanctuary, Thames21, London Waterkeeper and many others, a group of boaters wrote an open letter and started a petition. The aim is to scrutinise and improve (or establish?) the authorities' emergency response strategy for pollution incidents like this. This oil spill could have been contained much much earlier on. Let's make sure EA and CRT are better prepared in the future. 

Please sign and share widely: http://bit.ly/leadisaster

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Edited by anniewhere
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16 minutes ago, anniewhere said:

Thanks for signing!

We made it on the news.... you have to skip to 13:25 and it's available on the iplayer until 20 March, 7pm:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b09w7p2m/london-news-evening-news-19032018

Typically bullish attitude from CaRT: “If it happens again we’ll deal with it in exactly the same way!”  

Nice one. 

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5 minutes ago, Mike the Boilerman said:

Am I the only one wondering if the polluter is the one who should be being censured here, not CRT?

No, but I would have expected the EA & CRT to have contained and cleaned the spill as soon as it was reported.

Whoever is responsible needs landing on from a great height, but stopping the spill getting any worse is the most important step.

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17 minutes ago, Mike the Boilerman said:

Am I the only one wondering if the polluter is the one who should be being censured here, not CRT?

Polluter pours it in then sits back and watches CRT get criticised for not clearing it up fast enough. 

Oh, that the polluter has to be found and prosecuted is a given! Investigations are still ongoing, I hope it won't be swept under the carpet. You can't really petition an unknown culprit, so we're concentrating on what we CAN do now, and that is helping with clean-up operations and campaigning for a better strategy. We also sent an open letter with the same text as the petition to DEFRA, EAC and local MPs-

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41 minutes ago, anniewhere said:

Oh, that the polluter has to be found and prosecuted is a given! Investigations are still ongoing, I hope it won't be swept under the carpet. You can't really petition an unknown culprit, so we're concentrating on what we CAN do now, and that is helping with clean-up operations and campaigning for a better strategy. We also sent an open letter with the same text as the petition to DEFRA, EAC and local MPs-

Wouldn't a workboat, a skim pump and a few empty IBCs do more to help?  I'm sure EA would give you oil absorbent booms and cloths if you ask - I am just saddened that they were not already deployed in February.

I'd join in, but I am at the other end of the country. 

Edit to add:

Hell, throw bales of straw in the river and slosh them about a bit.  You will absorb about 70% of the floating oil that way if you have enough bales.

Edited by TheBiscuits
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47 minutes ago, TheBiscuits said:

Wouldn't a workboat, a skim pump and a few empty IBCs do more to help?  I'm sure EA would give you oil absorbent booms and cloths if you ask - I am just saddened that they were not already deployed in February.

I'd join in, but I am at the other end of the country. 

Edit to add:

Hell, throw bales of straw in the river and slosh them about a bit.  You will absorb about 70% of the floating oil that way if you have enough bales.

Thanks for your thoughts on this. EA have pumped out more than 80,000 litres of oil, but it was all too slow and CRT didn't close navigation early enough, which resulted in the oil spreading over five miles. CRT provided some oil pads, some areas were boomed off, but again, it just wasn't enough. A group of boaters got together and started making their own booms, using hessian sacks, hair and straw. We fished out lots of debris and rubbish covered in oil, which the EA then didn't collect for weeks.

What we need is long-term solutions and an effective emergency plan should something like this ever happen again (anywhere on the system). This was all a bit of a mess to be honest. 

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1 hour ago, anniewhere said:

Thanks for your thoughts on this. EA have pumped out more than 80,000 litres of oil, but it was all too slow and CRT didn't close navigation early enough, which resulted in the oil spreading over five miles. CRT provided some oil pads, some areas were boomed off, but again, it just wasn't enough. A group of boaters got together and started making their own booms, using hessian sacks, hair and straw. We fished out lots of debris and rubbish covered in oil, which the EA then didn't collect for weeks.

What we need is long-term solutions and an effective emergency plan should something like this ever happen again (anywhere on the system). This was all a bit of a mess to be honest. 

Thanks for the reply.  I do agree that the official response has been sadly lacking on this.

My unofficial response would be to get literally a truckload of bales at about £3 each and chuck them in the river upstream of the oil spread.  Post a fundraising link (justgiving or wherever) and I'll buy a few bales for you, as I am sure many other people on here would.

Fill the downstream lock with bales (they float, which means they are sat directly in the oil slick) and block the navigation.

Add any more dead birds to the floating, oil covered bales, and use your newfound media interest to get TV shots of dead birds sat on top of oily bales of straw.  You should not have to organise this, but if the authorities are acting incapable of doing so, then go for it.

I am a great supporter of CRT when they do things right, but in this case I do not think they have. The next time Richard Parry comes on my boat I will raise it with him (he has been on twice before).

If it is a turf war between CRT and the EA then shame them both on national media.  The punchline always has to be that they stop the oil slick now.  Figuring out who pays for it later is secondary, but still matters.  There can not be that many places that can "lose" thousands of gallons of used oil upstream of Pymmes Brook but there will be traces to follow.

 

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7 hours ago, TheBiscuits said:

Thanks for the reply.  I do agree that the official response has been sadly lacking on this.

My unofficial response would be to get literally a truckload of bales at about £3 each and chuck them in the river upstream of the oil spread.  Post a fundraising link (justgiving or wherever) and I'll buy a few bales for you, as I am sure many other people on here would.

Fill the downstream lock with bales (they float, which means they are sat directly in the oil slick) and block the navigation.

Add any more dead birds to the floating, oil covered bales, and use your newfound media interest to get TV shots of dead birds sat on top of oily bales of straw.  You should not have to organise this, but if the authorities are acting incapable of doing so, then go for it.

I am a great supporter of CRT when they do things right, but in this case I do not think they have. The next time Richard Parry comes on my boat I will raise it with him (he has been on twice before).

If it is a turf war between CRT and the EA then shame them both on national media.  The punchline always has to be that they stop the oil slick now.  Figuring out who pays for it later is secondary, but still matters.  There can not be that many places that can "lose" thousands of gallons of used oil upstream of Pymmes Brook but there will be traces to follow.

 

I thought that EA and CaRT had recently signed a memorandum of agreement o which should deal with particular pollution incidents. Of course, definitions will be all-important and scope for obfuscation, but I would have thought from what has been described, that this was unambiguously in the two categories that EA are responsible for. As the immediate 'victim' of the pollution, CaRT have a general responsibility in law to do whatever is reasonable to mitigate their loss. 

I have seen a number of snippets of information about the timeline, some of which suggest that both EA and CaRT were on site within a couple of hours or so of the incident being reported. Others suggest that it was days before anything was seen of them. It would be helpful to hear if there is an agreed timeline of events.

Naturally, those directly affected will put forward proposals that focus only on the prevention of a repeat on their specific stretch, more so when it is significantly a residential rather than cruising area. However, in the long term we do have to recognise that CaRT on its own has 2000 miles plus of waterways to deal with (not including adjacent non-navigable waters) and that the risk of pollution will vary, although the risks may not always be obvious - until they happen, that is! The idea of stock piling amounts of materials to deal immediately with any incident, however large or small, at any location in the country (whether CaRT or EA territory) is hopelessly unrealistic. A risk assessment is key. 

However, 'the public' generally fail to understand what a risk assessment says. It will never guarantee unlimited protection against not only a repetition of a past event, but also any similar event in the future. It is a sad consequence of being alive that 'stuff happens' and just sometimes, whatever the risk level may be set, that risk (even if at a 200 year level) may turn actual. 

What is then equally, if not more, important is what procedures are in place to pick up the pieces. But they too have to set expected response levels - clearly an instantaneous turn out is not economic. In this particular case, so we know what standards EA and CaRT have set for response times (both for immediate restraint of the pollution and its subsequent clean up)? Do we know whether either or both met those standards? It is not helpful to criticise anyone for meeting their obligations, especially if no-one objected to those standards in the first place, either when set explicitly or - and this is the more general case - when agreeing to a political policy to constrain public expenditure and its funding through taxation.

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3 hours ago, Mike Todd said:

 

However, 'the public' generally fail to understand what a risk assessment says. It will never guarantee unlimited protection against not only a repetition of a past event, but also any similar event in the future. It is a sad consequence of being alive that 'stuff happens' and just sometimes, whatever the risk level may be set, that risk (even if at a 200 year level) may turn actual. 

 

My risk assessment : this is not a once in a 200 year event.

I  don't think that it takes a lot of forward planning to keep pollution control detegents, booms and mats in stock either regionally or centrally. To wait four weeks before handing out mats to boaters, well it's pretty sad, and looks a bit ineffective from a pollution incident response viewpoint.

 

 

Edited by LadyG
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The response was unacceptably slow, but not unusual given the the EA & CRT are not geared up for such large spills.

80,000 litres is a massive spill of used engine oil. It should not be difficult to identify a company that stores that quantity of used oil. It won't be a diy'er changing his own engine oil.

The principle is that the polluter pays, so I would expect the EA to identify them fairly quickly, prosecute them and then apply to the court for clean up costs as we a a large fine.

When I was working one of my roles was to investigate environmental incidents and near misses,  so I had lots of contact with the EA. Theyare always looking for to make examples out of commercial polluters, especially if they are a well known company. It acts as a deterrent to others.

Edited by cuthound
Grandma
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3 minutes ago, cuthound said:

80,000 litres is a massive spill of used engine oil. It should not be difficult to identify a company that stores that quantity of used oil.

Wow. I can't imagine it was 80 000 litres of oil.

Edited by rusty69
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2 minutes ago, cuthound said:

80,000 litres is a massive spill of used engine oil. It should not be difficult to identify a company that stores that quantity of used oil.

The principal is that the polluter pays, so I would expect the EA to identify them fairly quickly, prosecute them and then apply to the court for clean up costs as we a a large fine.

When I was working one of my roles was to investigate environmental incidents and near misses,  so I had lots of contact with the EA. Theyare always looking for to make examples out of commercial polluters, especially if they are a well known company. It acts as a deterrent to others.

I suspect it will be 80,000 litres of oil and water, not just the oil.

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Signed.

I had to sign this once I'd seen that it had already been signed by Feargal Sharkey (note: I would have signed it anyway) and found out that it was indeed him and not just some namesake. 

The mention of the great man's name has necessitated the appropriate instruction to Alexa. Great stuff!

 

 

 

 

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