The New Padstow Marine Conservation Zone

Trevone and Rocky Beach are now part of a marine conservation zone, which is terrific news for local wildlife. This stretch of coastline is characterised by rocky shores and sandy bays, and it has a mandate to protect extensive rocky outcrops and reefs that support rich underwater communities, just like those found at Rocky!

The Marine Conservation Zone covers an area from the shore line out to sea (at approx. 50 metres deep). Trevone has one of the most extensive rocky shores on the North Cornwall coast. All manner of marine plants and creatures live there, from algae grazing limpets through to filter feeding mussels and barnacles.

Perhaps with this status, South West Water will take greater care when considering a sewage discharge.  

More spills...

We are starting to see a pattern of pump failure and liquid build up leading to two more spills of untreated sewage on 26th October 2013 and 3rd November 2013…

It's summer and the sewage is still flowing!

It all started on August Bank Holiday Monday (26th August 2013) and ended finally on the following Tuesday (3rd September 2013). The pumping station failed (again) and so the unwanted waste had to go somewhere… and that somewhere was the overflow pipe on Rocky Beach.

The graph above shows the number if days over which discharges occurred. The blue line shows the pumping rate, and the red line shows the liquid level in the holding tank.

You can see that where the red line climbs up towards the top of the graph the blue line is down near zero, showing that the duty pumps have failed, and the stand-by pumps that should cut-in to replace them have failed to start up.

This resulted in a release lasting about 6 hours on 30th August (indicated by the flat section of red-line at the top of the graph directly to the right of the box with "Pump Rate" and "Wet Well Level"). This spill occurred onto the middle of Rocky Beach where the pipe is currently truncated.

This is happening during the bathing season, one of the most popular times of the year for tourists! It’s shocking that more being done by South West Water and the Environment Agency to deal with this!

UPDATE 20TH MAY 2015 - South West Water knew this at the time - these data go to their control room by telemetry so that South West Water are immediately informed of problems such as this – South West Water did not intervene so as to prevent the spill, despite having plenty of warning (following the initial pump failure on 26- 27 Aug), the failure from about noon on 28 Aug led to a build-up lasting for more than 48 hours before the spill - plenty of warning.