The strangest things found in Coventry’s drains

Poo, pee and paper - the three Ps. That is what Severn Trent has been pleading with businesses and residents to flush down their lavatories. Still, all manner of things end up at the Finham Water Treatment facility.

On a regular Thursday afternoon visit, Severn Water showed the skipload of wet wipes and rags that had made their way to the facility. However amongst the pile were things ranging from socks to children’s toys, and even a square of carpet.

What’s more, the plant also receives input from some of the surface drains that line public streets, meaning cigarette butts, needles, and a lot of grit can find their way to the plant. Severn Trent’s blockages strategy lead Grant Mitchell said nothing else should be going near the sink or toilet.

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“Wet wipes, nappies, cotton buds, dental floss, sanitary products. Those sorts of things need to be bagged and binned."

As for the kitchen, Mitchell said dry wiping greasy pots and pans helped massively with keeping the pipes clear.

“All that leftover food, especially sauces and gravy and that, if that goes down the sink, it will congeal with things like wet wipes and cause a fatberg which blocks the sewer. Once that sewer blocks, it can’t come to the works and will instead go back to where it came from which could unfortunately be on your property, into a park, or into a river.”

Two large pipes crammed full of congealed waste slowly spurt the product out onto a concrete pad before it’s gathered up into a skip. It’s a slow-moving and seemingly endless lump of rubbish, somewhat resembling the first squirt of a new toothpaste tube.

It’s easy to think of the sink or the lavatory as a mysterious hole where things disappear into thin air but when it comes to the three Ps, it's a process of recycling. Dirty water gets turned into fresh and clean water that goes right back into the river system and eventually out to the Bristol Channel.

The only snag is the blockages, which team leader Sam Craig said can mean allocating labour away from other important tasks.

“The reactive side is where it really hurts us. Where we’re not expecting something to fail and it does fail, that’s where we could be talking hours, sometimes days, on an issue.

Craig said that was a pump to fail at the pumping station, a minimum of two people were needed to lift the pump, and then possibly more to be drafted in, depending on the severity of the issue. The impact of businesses versus individuals was highlighted as well.

For businesses where there’s a clear record of them operating at a premises for which the origin of any improper material in the pipe can be identified, it makes it easier for punitive measures to be taken. This means that if there were to be a building site, for example, with an open drain through which gravel, debris, chemicals, and other materials were being dumped, it’s easier to take measures against that company.

However, individuals are much tougher to trace wet wipes and other non-flushables back to. Mitchell said that despite some products being labelled as flushable, it didn’t necessarily mean they wouldn’t block a pipe.

“In a dream world where only the three Ps were flushed, it would be such a simple system. Our staff would only have to go around the network, checking if everything worked, and making it a better experience for the customers.

“The message is slowly getting there and we’ve reduced blockages significantly over the last few years through our campaigns. We are chipping away at it really well but we still need to get the message out there to everybody.”