SusWoT help clear 40 sacks of rubbish and more from Trymside
About 16 SusWoT and Friend’s of Blaise litter pickers turned up at the entrance to Trimside of the Doncaster Road, opposite Badock’s Wood in Southmead to clear that section of the Trym.
The first challange was the large grate that stopped large debris flowing down the Trym, it was so blocked it stopped the water too. Dawn and Vanessa cleared a hole and the water started flowing. The Trym started to flow. Latter George finished the job to produce a beautiful cleared grate with lovely clear water flowing under Doncaster Road into Badock’s Wood.
The Trym itself was full of the usual waste. There were TVs, lots of metal cans, all sorts of plastic items, a vacuum cleaner, pogo stick and masses more. Unfortunately even 16 people working for a couple of hours were unable to get all the rubbbish and about a quarter of the river still needs to be cleaned.
Anthea from Team Southmead brought cakes. As part of the equipment we have there is hand cleaner always available so people were able to eat the cakes, and very good they were too. The dog is Erin, the humans (from the dog) Robert, Liz, Anthea. Ruth, Max, Pete and Alex. There were two piles of rubbish. Bristol Parks collected all the rubbish promptly on Monday morning.
It looks a lot better now!
But there is more to do. The pipe on the left above flows into the Trym and as you can see there is some pollution. This may be due to a misconnection. A misconnection is where a street drain has a sewage pipe from a house connected to it incorrectly. This may happen when a new toilet is added to a house and the plumber adds it to the nearest drain which unfortunately is a street drain and not a sewage drain, it is misconnected.
What’s the plan for the misconnection?
Hi Peter
SusWoT is aware that Wessex Water and the Environmnet Agency have been tackling this in the past. I am not aware of the current actions.
Alex Dunn
Chair SusWoT
Hi Peter
SusWoT are working with Friends of Badock’s Wood and Friends of Blaise to improve the ecology of and around the Trym. Friends of Badock’s Wood are already working with https://www.wessexwater.co.uk/connectright/ Wessex Water on this issue. Although there is no formal plan in place yet the expectation is that we will monitor the water for pollution and then feed this information to Wessex Water and the Environment Agency. This process will be a key part of improving the quality of water in the Trym to improve the ecology.
I very much enjoyed helping. I thought that this was a great initiative and now looking at the web site I see that you’ve done a lot before already. Particularly great that you are stopping at least some plastics from going down the river and eventually ending up in the sea. Here is a blog I wrote on marine plastics surveys and the effect of these plastics on marine mammals http://www.sustainableredland.org.uk/2018/05/song-of-the-whale/