A drone video that shows raw sewage being dumped into a UK river for 49 hours straight has shocked Britain and tapped into a national debate about the environment ahead of the COP26 climate summit.
In 2020, there were 403,171 spills of sewage into England’s streams, rivers, and seas, lasting some 3 million hours in total. But last week, that didn’t stop UK lawmakers from voting against a bill that would have slapped water companies with new duties if they didn’t reduce discharging untreated sewage into the waterways.
Now, photographer Chris Pearsall’s drone is helping people to understand just how dirty politics can be, quite literally.
Pearsall says he “just couldn’t believe” what he was seeing, as his drone captured a treatment plant run by Southern Water releasing raw sewage from a 7-foot pipe into Langstone Harbour, which is a conservation area. Here’s Pearsall:
I’ve been in the job 50 years and I’ve never seen anything like this…
