School summer holidays are starting. I don’t know if there is a causal relationship, but it probably won’t come as a huge surprise to many residents of West Devon that the UK Met Office’s rainfall map of the area looked like this yesterday afternoon:
As luck would have it, I had just set up our shiny new Twitter account so that I could report to the rest of the planet on yesterday’s exciting news from Halwill Junction football pitch.
Twitter insisted that I “follow” several other accounts, and of course South West Water was top of my list! Whereupon Elon Musk‘s latest (single) X algorithm suddenly revealed this to me:
As you can see, having watched these sort of events for several years from the other side of the River Tamar I felt compelled to respond with a screenshot of South West Water’s “Water Fit Live” map of bathing water conditions around Devon and Cornwall!
Later in the evening my implied prediction came to pass:
Do you see what I mean @Geoffrey_Cox?#EndSewagePollution
— WestDevonInfo (@west_devon_info) July 26, 2023
Cc: @pow_rebecca @theresecoffey pic.twitter.com/1eyLgIFu8a
I don’t know about you, but personally I don’t much care for going bodyboarding in sewage. Widemouth Bay in North Cornwall is still our nearest big beach break. However the beach at Westward Ho! is in the Torridge and West Devon constituency, so I thought I’d raise the matter with my new Member of Parliament. I suspect that Sir Geoffrey Cox doesn’t read his Twitter notifications on a regular basis. However he’s due to give me a telephone call on Saturday concerning a different matter. If time allows I’ll raise the question of South West Water’s continuing pollution of our rivers and seas with him then
[Edit – July 27th 18:00]Time has passed, and now South West Water’s Water Fit Live map looks like this:
Note that the pollution alert for Westward Ho! has disappeared, together with several others around the coast of Devon and Cornwall. Note also the alert at Woolacombe hiding behind the pop-up information about Westward Ho!
However the Surfers Against Sewage pollution map tells a rather different tale:
Evidently 48 hours have yet to elapse since the spill at Westward Ho!
To be continued…
Top of the Poops is a humorously entitled web site with a serious message.
Here is the TotP top ten list of sewage pollution incidents in electoral constituencies across England and Wales:
As you can see, Torridge and West Devon is heading up the charts, and is very nearly a number one hit!