Water Quality

[grumpybum]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-12098028

 

Please discuss.

[DavyR]

"the Environment Agency has plans in place to re-vitalise 9,500 miles of waterways between now and 2015."

 

Why does that statement fill me with unease? Most wildlife (including fish) thrives on neglect rather than well-meaning attempts at "re-vitalisation". I hope the EA plans don't include "improving access for the general public" and/or "tidying-up".

[chesters1]

it probably means raising banks ,straightening stretches and dredging just like it always has ,trouble is the EA forget what they are up to is only doing what was done centuries ago but was neglected ,they are trying to make natural something that isnt.

A flood plain is one because it floods ,its not bad its good ,not having them is bad and no amount of interference will stop it flooding if its supposed to naturally or unnaturally.

bridges are unatural and its where the problems lie on most rivers ,will they remove them? ofcourse not they will try to get around the problems another way typically a bad way going by history.

as soon as the bridge spans in elstead (a local village) are under water it backs up and soon the bridge in the village spans go under and on and on upstream .were lucky theres plenty of water meadows if not the sequence would be greatly faster and far more devastating ,i expect the EA would simply raise the banks because housing is involved elsewhere putting the problems elsewhere up or down stream.

the problem isnt rain or river capacity its bloody housing getting in the way forcing them to make decisions best left to physics ,if you raise a bank 5ft and it rises 4ft6" somewhere along the line the bank is 4ft high and the river will go inland there ,the trouble is because the banks are atificially high the water cannot get back into the river to ebb away making the problem far worse

Edited December 31, 2010 by chesters1

[thamesoddity]

It's interesting how they mention rivers like the thames and mersey for salmon, but not rivers like the wye whose historic salmon runs are still in serious decline.

[Steve Walker]

To be fair to the EA, in my area they have been doing some habitat improvement - things like building a lagoon as a fry refuge during flooding and replacing gravel which had been extracted in the past. I think tackling abstraction is going to be a bigger and more intractable issue, though.

[Steve Burke]

To be fair to the EA, in my area they have been doing some habitat improvement - things like building a lagoon as a fry refuge during flooding and replacing gravel which had been extracted in the past. I think tackling abstraction is going to be a bigger and more intractable issue, though.

 

Habitat improvement is just what they've been doing to the river on my land at Wingham. Amongst other things groynes have been put in to create pools, plus trees will shortly be planted - exactly the opposite of what they'd done in the past! Yet we don't fish the river, only the pits, so it's not for the direct benefit of anglers. Instead the work's being done for the whole local ecology.

 

It's a far cry from the mid 90s when lots of our water voles were buried by flood prevention measures. Now the various departments actually consult each other before any work is carried out.

 

Rivers are certainly being improved, partly because the UK is being forced to by the EU. However the figures don't tell the whole story and many rivers still have a long, long way to go whilst some are actually still getting worse.

 

It'll take years for the mistakes of the past to be corrected, and the EA are by no means perfect, but at least a start has been made.

[lutra]

It's interesting how they mention rivers like the thames and mersey for salmon, but not rivers like the wye whose historic salmon runs are still in serious decline.

I think tipping a few bucket fulls of salmon parr in a river is just a cheap and easy way of making things look rosy. In reality they don't have to survive long in the river before they head out to sea and if one or two come back things look great, but i would doubt it means much about the quality of the river or it's water.

[Steve Walker]

We saw a little trout by the footbridge in the stream at the fish-in before last - you might end up with a bit of wild trout fishing on site!