{"id":498607,"date":"2026-06-18T06:49:08","date_gmt":"2026-06-18T06:49:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/498607\/"},"modified":"2026-06-18T06:49:08","modified_gmt":"2026-06-18T06:49:08","slug":"pollution-monitoring-first-for-river-test-chalk-stream","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/498607\/","title":{"rendered":"Pollution monitoring first for River Test chalk stream"},"content":{"rendered":"

“I’ve been a river keeper in Hampshire for 10 years but I grew up looking after a river in Yorkshire” says Seth Crosswaite, river keeper at Houghton Lodge.<\/p>\n

“What you want to see in a chalk stream is nice clean gravel. That’s what the fish need to spawn on.”<\/p>\n

“All those monitors down that river will measure it in real-time. So if we get a pollution incident we can look above stream and down stream of it. Above stream to see where it is and downstream to see what effect it is having on the river.”<\/p>\n

Concern about the health of the River Test grew in 2024 when heavy rain saw overflow sewer outlets spill into the river during what Southern Water called “exceptional circumstances”.<\/p>\n

In March that year hundreds of campaigners and residents protested<\/a> outside the company’s Fullerton Waste Water Treatment Works.<\/p>\n

According to Geoff Cooper that protest proved a turning point.<\/p>\n

“That made Southern Water realised just how angry people were.”<\/p>\n

“They opened their doors to us and gave us the opportunity to work collaboratively together to find solutions to better understand the quality of our rivers.”<\/p>\n

Southern Water says it’s investing 84 million pounds improving water quality on the Test – 28 million pounds at Fullerton Waste Water Treatment Works. <\/p>\n

The company says the voluntary monitoring scheme puts it ahead of the game and prepares the way for forthcoming legislation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"“I’ve been a river keeper in Hampshire for 10 years but I grew up looking after a river…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":498608,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[242,85,46,141],"class_list":["post-498607","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-environment","tag-environment","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/498607","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=498607"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/498607\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/498608"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=498607"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=498607"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=498607"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}