Black and Veatch Fined
Black and Veatch Ltd have been fined £3,000 and ordered to pay £1,420 costs as well as a victim surcharge of £15 after polluting the River Ouse with sewage.
The company were the main contractors in the £15.5M upgrade of Yorkshire Water's sewage treatment at Naburn last April. An unsupervised pump that was being used to pump effluent between two tanks had slipped down to the bottom of the tank when it was left running overnight. The layer of sewage sludge at the bottom of the tank was pumped into the river. Black and Veatch have changed their procedures to ensure there would be no repetition of this incident in the future.
The effluent that was discharged into the river had a Biochemical Oxygen Demand that was six times over the permitted limit and suspended solids that were more than 23 times over the permitted level. Paul Harley, for the EA, said “unsupervised overnight pumping posed a foreseeable risk which was not considered and the incident presented a high risk of serious damage to the watercourse.”
|
