No matter the location, having robust, reliable sewage treatment is a vital part of your household or business operations – especially if you happen to live near water.
Areas in close proximity to waterways or the sea have additional considerations when it comes to sewage treatment, as failure to maintain a healthy sewage treatment plant can result in severe consequences.
Let’s break down the risks of untreated sewage being discharged into the ocean, and we’ll explain how worried you should really be.
If your septic tank system or sewage treatment plant is unable to process effluent effectively, or when too much water has entered your system, it can result in wastewater escaping at various weak points in your pipework or through your overloaded soakaway.
When this happens, raw or partially treated sewage can escape into the environment, polluting the surrounding area, poisoning wildlife and causing property damage in the process.
Sewage contains a number of dangerous substances which could harm people and wildlife, including household cleaning chemicals, pharmaceutical products and nasty bacteria from within your tanks and pipework… not to mention human waste!
If untreated sewage enters the environment, it can cause all kinds of problems and can leave you liable to prosecution for any damage resulting from discharges.
However, if your sewage treatment plant is located near a water supply, or your treated wastewater usually flows directly into surface water, there is a higher potential for untreated sewage to travel much further and cause more damage.
This can result in environmental pollution, including Eutrophication, which can increase algae growth and create ‘dead zones’ – where oxygen levels in the water drop so low that certain wildlife can no longer survive.
The biggest danger comes from untreated effluent entering the drinking water supply, which is why discharges into the sea are so disruptive – in certain parts of the country, drinking water comes from the ocean rather than lakes, rivers or reservoirs.
Facilities like the Thames Water Desalination Plant can process up to 100 million litres of tidal river water per day, potentially supplying 900,000 people with drinking water, so making sure that waterways remain unpolluted is essential to public health.
Most large-scale sewage treatment plants are located at lower elevations, since this reduces the costs of having to collect large volumes of wastewater and move it back upstream.
Whilst this saves a lot of time, materials and energy for wastewater management companies, this lower elevation also means that they are more susceptible to coastal flooding.
Alongside this, aging mains drainage infrastructure (much of which was built in the Victorian era) is no longer capable of coping with the increased amounts of wastewater that we see in our modern-day towns and cities, meaning backlogs and overflows are becoming increasingly more common.
However, it’s not just large-scale sewage treatment plants which can experience issues with flooding – residential septic systems and commercial sewage treatment plants can also encounter problems if they aren’t properly maintained.
The effects of climate change have increased the intensity of rainfall we receive annually, which brings an increased risk of storms, flooding and other extreme weather events.
In combination with the rising sea levels, this can cause lasting disruption or damage to our sewage treatment systems and drains, increasing the likelihood of a pipe bursting or a septic tank overflowing.
Thankfully, untreated sewage discharges are rare, and the threat posed by them is minimal – but we should still continue to be proactive when it comes to taking care of our sewage treatment plants.
The best way to prevent untreated sewage discharges is to know how they come about and take steps to mitigate the issues that cause them.
In cases where your sewage treatment plant or septic tank discharges into surface water (such as lakes, rivers or coastal water) as part of the sewage treatment process, you should make sure you have read the government’s general binding rules and are aware of how to keep your wastewater management systems compliant.
Keeping your septic tank or sewage treatment plant in a healthy working condition is a must if this applies to you, since there is an increased chance that flooding or excessive rainfall can cause problems or risk of overflowing.
Getting your drainage system surveyed is a great place to start, as you can identify potential problems with your sewage treatment systems before they develop any further – to book a CCTV drainage survey, or if you want to know more about how to keep your drainage system fault-free, give one of our experts at Proseptic a call today!