Sewage pollution

When will the water companies be made to clean up their acts?

- Sandra Laville Environment correspondent

A vomiting surfer', part of a London South Bank installation to promote Channel 4's Dirty Business. Left, dead fish at a brook following a pollution release. Far left, fish feed from the sediment of a sewer overflow into the River Brathay, near Windermere.

Sarah Lambert took her usual morning swim off Exmouth town beach before her volunteer shift helping disabled people get access to the water.

A wheelchair user herself, Lambert's twice-weekly swims between the lifeboat station and Heydays restaurant were the perfect exercise for her disability.

It was August 2024, and a dry summer's day on England's southwest coast. At 4.15pm, lifeguards shut the beach, erected red flags and asked people to leave the water after East Devon district council was alerted to a catastrophic burst of the main pipe pumping sewage to the town's treatment works.

It was too late for Lambert. Later that day she started vomiting and was taken to hospital with life-threatening sepsis after being infected by E coli and Citrobacter bacteria, often found in sewage.

Anger about the state of the privatised water industry in England intensified this week after the screening of Channel 4's docudrama Dirty Business. It weaves the human tragedy of the death from E coli 0157 poisoning in 1999 of eight-year-old Heather Preen - who had paddled just the other side of the Exe estuary from Lambert's swimming spot - with the unfolding of an environmental and public health crisis.

It explores three decades of underinvestment by water companies, uncovered in part by amateur sleuths Peter Hammond and Ash Smith, as well as the cosy relationship between the water companies and those meant to be holding them to account.