565.98 hours of poLlution

Between 20 January and 13 February this year, discharge at a sewage pumping site in a Devon seaside town ran for 565.98 hours.

That’s more than 23 DAYS!

Following a Freedom of Information request we submitted to South West Water, records for The Ham sewage pumping station in Sidmouth stand out for all the wrong reasons.

This wasn’t a series of short spills. It wasn’t a spike during heavy rain. It was continuous.

That is not how storm overflows are supposed to behave. They are designed as a short-term safety valve during periods of intense rainfall, not something that runs for weeks at a time.

A number like this tells a very different story. It suggests a system that didn’t recover, where capacity was exceeded not just briefly but persistently, and where wastewater may have been diverted away from treatment for an extended period.

In plain terms, this looks like continuous pollution.

And it doesn’t sit in isolation. Across Sidmouth, Sidford and the surrounding area, there were 400+ recorded spill events in just a few weeks. The average spill lasted around three hours. That means this isn’t the occasional overflow during extreme weather... it’s frequent, repeated discharge happening as a matter of course.

The Ham is the most extreme example, but it reflects a wider pattern of a system under sustained pressure.

Because if one site can discharge for over three weeks straight, the question isn’t just what happened here. It’s how often this is happening elsewhere, and whether this is no longer exceptional, but simply how the system now operates.