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Anglian Water has been fined £50,000 and ordered to pay £44,736 in costs after sewage contaminated a brook through an emergency overflow pipe in Essex.
The water company entered late guilty pleas to breaching two conditions of its environmental permit at Chelmsford Magistrates’ Court on Thursday.
All three of its pumps at Ingrave pumping station, near Brentwood failed in the early hours of Sunday 10 April 2011 and sewage polluted more than 4 kilometres of the Haverings Grove Brook.
Over 1,500 fish were killed after alarms failed to alert the water company to the pollution.
Mark Watson, prosecuting for the EA, said: “There was a pattern of failure to respond appropriately to alarms and telemetry data in the run up to 10 April 2011.
“It is clear that at some point after midnight, in the early hours of 10 April 2011, a discharge of crude sewage from the emergency overflow commenced. However, no emergency overflow alarm was ever generated or received”.
At one point the pumping station was left with no operational pumps for 12 hours.
Anglian Water said it “deeply regretted” the incident and had taken “various remedial and precautionary actions” since.
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