Pollution on Ravensbourne

Pollution on Mill Pond 29 July – photo by Kari Silvester

Kari Silvester and some other members continue to monitor pollution incidents on the Mill Pond, in Glassmill Lane. Many of these are due to mis-connections of waste water outlets in parts of the surrounding areas. Kari has been liaising with the Environment Agency (EA) on such incidents. The latter have identified this as a misconnections ‘hot spot’ and are working with Thames water to identify and eliminate them.

Kari has recently recede this brief EA report –

I just wanted to give you a brief update, my colleague and I were out in the Bromley area on Friday and, with the help of Thames Water, discovered a source of pollution to the Ravensbourne river near Bromley South station. Due to data protection I
cannot provide further details but as this location was upstream of Glassmill Pond you should hopefully see an improvement to the water quality there, although the Environment Agency and Thames Water still have a long way to go in locating all the sources of pollution leading to this point. It is good news nevertheless and please let us know if you have any questions.

If you spot any such incidents please telephone the Environment Agency on 0208 474 9439

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Mill Pond: More Pollution

Pollution on Mill Pond 29 July – photo by Kari Silvester

There was yet another pollution incident on the River Ravensbourne, at Mill Pond, Glassmill Lane on 29 July. This appeared to be sand, like an earlier incident, and which covered most of the pond surface. This was reported to the Environment Agency (ref: 1544086) by a Friends member. The long term environmental impact of this latest incident is currently uncertain.The pollution has subsequently been moving down stream. We await the result of this latest EA investigation.

Recently there have been an increased number of such incidents, some very serious. These incidents are the result of either unauthorised mis-connection of waste water outlets (e.g. sinks), or the illegal emptying of waste into local surface water drains or water courses.  The Environmental Agency, working with Thames Water, consider this a pollution ‘hot spot’, and the Mill Pond is being closely monitored by local volunteers and reported to the EA. If you spot pollution in our local rivers please report to the Environment Agency on 0800 807060