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<\/p>\nTony Baines is peering through an open manhole with the neutral expression of a man who is used to watching \u2014 and smelling \u2014 human waste float by. But he\u2019s not looking at the raw sewage surging through a 2m-wide pipe beneath his feet. His focus is the strange new devices bolted near the top of the manhole, pointing down at the murk.<\/p>\n
\u201cThose are our new data sensors,\u201d says Baines, a Geordie former shipyard\u2019s draughtsman who is now the wastewater treatment manager at Northumbrian Water. \u201cWe\u2019ve got 750 of these units, providing levels in real time.\u201d<\/p>\n
The sensors bounce ultrasound waves off the sewage to measure how much is flowing through the pipes in a trial section of Northumbrian\u2019s network, which includes almost 20,000 miles of sewers serving 2.7 million customers across the northeast of England. They feed the data to computers on the ground. In this rural location, near the seaside town of Whitley Bay, the computers sit in a metal unit beside a dirt track.<\/p>\n
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James Parker and Connor Bell carry out an inspection at a pumping station near Howdon sewage treatment works<\/p>\n
IAN FORSYTH FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES<\/p>\n
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Float alarms and sensors can detect stress in the system and prevent sewage overflows by redirecting waste<\/p>\n
IAN FORSYTH FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES<\/p>\n
But it\u2019s what happens in the cloud, where the data from the sensors is gathered, alongside weather modelling and some very smart artificial intelligence, that the water industry is talking up as the best thing to happen to sewage since Joseph Bazalgette banished the Great Stink<\/a> from Victorian London.<\/p>\n They call them \u201csmart sewers\u201d and they are the result of a partnership between Northumbrian and HydroDigital, a tech startup from Indiana in the US, where Montestruque said spills had been cut by 85 per cent as part of an attempt to stop storm overflows in the city\u2019s ageing sewage infrastructure \u2014 without major new infrastructure costs. <\/p>\n The system, part of an \u00a380 million investment by the utility company, is ultimately designed to tackle the most toxic scandal of our times: the intentional spewing of billions of litres of raw sewage<\/a> into Britain\u2019s rivers and seas.<\/p>\n \u2022 How do we pull Britain\u2019s water industry out of a \u2018doom loop\u2019?<\/b><\/a><\/p>\n Without \u201chydraulic relief\u201d, as the deliberate release of raw sewage into waterways is known in the trade, heavy rain would overwhelm sewage treatment works, back up in the network and create flooding, ultimately returning our waste to our bathrooms. The problem is that these spills \u2014 from more than 1,000 outlets in Northumbrian\u2019s network alone \u2014 are getting worse<\/a>.<\/p>\n Last year, serious pollution incidents in England rose 60 per cent compared with the previous year, according to government figures, and all pollution incidents were up almost 30 per cent. <\/p>\n While Northumbrian has been one of the better performers, it has seen a rise in all pollution incidents to 105 a year from 2021 to 2024, up from an average of 62 a year from 2017 to 2020.<\/p>\n In July, the company, which is ultimately owned by a Hong Kong-based conglomerate and a private equity firm in New York, agreed to invest a further \u00a315.7 million from its shareholders. It said this \u201cenforcement package\u201d would improve efforts to cut pollution after the water regulator Ofwat said maintenance and operational failures had led to \u201cexcessive spills\u201d. <\/p>\n
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