The British media is all abuzz with the breathless reporting about a discharge of raw sewage into the Firth of Forth. For those who are unfamiliar with the nomenclature, the firth is the estuary of the river Forth. (The English version of English has a few differences from the American.) Every news outlet has a variation on the above linked story, this one is from the Telegraph.
Engineers were last night working to halt one of Scotland's worst environmental disasters, after millions of litres of raw sewage ran into the Firth of Forth.
Local people were being warned not to enter the water or pick up fish from the shore as much of Edinburgh's waste flowed untreated into the estuary for the third day.
The spill began on Friday after a mechanical failure at the Seafield treatment plant in the Leith area of the city.
At one point over the weekend, one thousand litres of untreated waste were leaking from the plant every second.
Last night, Jack McConnell, Scotland's First Minister, called for an urgent inquiry into the disaster.
Opposition parties claimed that Seafield plant needed extra investment and questioned if such an important facility should have been built and maintained under the controversial private finance initiative. Edinburgh council gave a warning that the high levels of raw sewage released into the water could be a health risk to both humans and animals.
Gordon Greenhill, head of community safety at Edinburgh City Council, said: "Raw sewage obviously has E.coli and the implications for the young and elderly are always there."
I'll just point out that until the modern sewage treatment facilities were built, the dumping of completely raw sewage was routine. Is this bad? Yes. Is it the end of the world as we know it? Not hardly. It needs to be fixed, but pumps break – that would be a fact of life. (Incidentally, the sewage is not entirely raw, according to another story. That report stated that the sewage has been partially treated with most of the solids removed.) As disgusting as the effluent is, the political posturing that follows is probably even more toxic. Mechanical systems do actually break from time to time. There is an old engineering adage. Fast, cheap or good; you can pick any two. Government bidding processes are set up to almost always pick the first two.
