Paul Whitehouse: Our troubled waters - how you can help

How can we help our troubled rivers.

As Paul Whitehouse highlighted in his programs one of the main sources of river pollution are the Combined Sewage Outflows (CSO's) which are designed to direct sewage into our rivers during times of heavy rainfall, when it would be diluted and washed away by the rainwater. Unfortunately the water companies often find it convenient to illegally discharge at other times when the consequences can be dire for life in the river.
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A look at the River Trust Poo Map, which details all the combined sewage outflows (CSO’s) in the country will tell you where the CSO's are in our area. Silsden beck itself has only two CSO's; one by the weir below the duck pond and another below Clog Bridge. The one below Clog Bridge appears to be the end of a culvert that runs up Elliot Street towards Dradishaw Road. There is also another outflow, which does not appear on the map, above the bridge on the right looking up stream. It may 

Milky discharge from outlet above Clog Bridge.

​just be a surface water drain but we have been concerned about it in the past as it had been discharging in dry weather with a cloudy flow. When an outflow is discharging in dry weather this indicates that it may be illegal sewage or possibly a misconnection (see this blog on misconnections). However this is not foolproof as the outflow below the bridge will probably be a culverted stream, so it is likely to run continuously. However it is worth, whenever you walk over Clog Bridge, to just look over to check the flow from these outlets, if it is cloudy or milky please report it to the Environment Agency and also let us know. For more details on how to do this go to the How you can Help page. According to the Poo Map neither of our CSO's discharges much, although it does say there are technical problems which may mean incidents are under reported, so we need to keep an eye on them.

Another way we can help to maintain the water quality in the beck is to regularly monitor the invertebrates (bugs) that live in it. Certain bugs are very sensitive to water quality and numbers will drop off after a pollution incident, so checking for invertebrates (riverfly sampling) is a good way to monitor water quality.
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Doing a kick sample.

FoSB have been riverfly sampling the beck for some years but this has been mainly in the lower reaches of the beck below Aldi. We would like to extend this up stream and would welcome volunteer samplers. Sampling is fairly straight forward, we get in the stream and kick the gravel on the riverbed to dislodge any bugs which are washed into a net held down stream. We then examine the sample and count the bugs. Certain bugs are more sensitive to pollution so we are looking for eight indicator species, they are fairly easy to spot.

​No prior knowledge is required to become a river monitor, the Aire Rivers Trust would provide full training as part of their Citizen Science Project.
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If you are interested please contact us.

Checking the sample.

Stonefly nymphs are an indicator species.