Since the last few months have been pretty wet, you might have thought that we must be going into the summer with nice, well-filled reservoirs.
No, we aren’t. And, yes, it is because of the water companies, but not in the obvious way.
It goes like this. Reservoirs get a lot of their water from rivers. The rivers get lots of their water from the heavens and run off. But when there is a lot of rain, the combined sewer systems can’t cope. So then those same fresh water rivers actually become sewers, and get lots of raw sewage in them, as we have seen. And you really don’t want to feed those sewers into the reservoirs. So the water companies don’t.
Consequently, despite the rain, this year we will continue to do the “emergency” water abstraction that we have done every year for yonks.
If we had better sewage systems we would have more fresh water.
