I've just got back from what was possibly the saddest & most sickening sight I've ever witnessed on the drains. There are literally thousands of fish dying as a result of pollution from the Crowland St. area.
I got a call from Wrighty earlier this morning and when I met him at Moss Lane, the sight of a river full of dead & dying fish met us. We stood there in disbelief at the carnage which was in front of us. The smell coming off the water was sickening and it was no wonder the fish had already succombed in such large numbers.
The Environment Agency have sent a team down to address the situation on the waterway and the pumps are going to try & remove the polluted water from the system. United Utilities are in attendance at Crowland Street and I've been reliably informed that the Association Secretary was there to meet them to assess the damage.
I went onto Water Lane and that was the real sickener for me - as I told Wrighty on the phone, you can almost walk across the river on the backs of the fish. There were Pike 2-3 feet long, lined up in the margins with hardly any life in them and I literally couldn't count the number of roach, bream, skimmers, perch, tench, ruffe - all in their final death throes. Rather than the teeming hordes of dead fish which were floating downstream on the surface, down in the lower reaches approaching the pumphouse, there were hundreds, if not thousands of dead fish which were now on the bottom.
It is to be hoped that the Environment Agency can put a fully co-ordinated disaster recovery operation in place to save as many fish as possible, otherwise we're facing a barren waterway on our card for at least the immediate future.
I got a call from Wrighty earlier this morning and when I met him at Moss Lane, the sight of a river full of dead & dying fish met us. We stood there in disbelief at the carnage which was in front of us. The smell coming off the water was sickening and it was no wonder the fish had already succombed in such large numbers.
The Environment Agency have sent a team down to address the situation on the waterway and the pumps are going to try & remove the polluted water from the system. United Utilities are in attendance at Crowland Street and I've been reliably informed that the Association Secretary was there to meet them to assess the damage.
I went onto Water Lane and that was the real sickener for me - as I told Wrighty on the phone, you can almost walk across the river on the backs of the fish. There were Pike 2-3 feet long, lined up in the margins with hardly any life in them and I literally couldn't count the number of roach, bream, skimmers, perch, tench, ruffe - all in their final death throes. Rather than the teeming hordes of dead fish which were floating downstream on the surface, down in the lower reaches approaching the pumphouse, there were hundreds, if not thousands of dead fish which were now on the bottom.
It is to be hoped that the Environment Agency can put a fully co-ordinated disaster recovery operation in place to save as many fish as possible, otherwise we're facing a barren waterway on our card for at least the immediate future.
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