Foam suds alert on River Ouse

YORKSHIRE Water has been unable to discover the cause of foam suds seen floating down the River Ouse in York.

Reader Chris Gallagher contacted The Press to say he had seen what looked like “effluent suds” on the river near Lendal Bridge while walking to work on Monday morning. He said he had contacted Yorkshire Water, which had said it would investigate.

A Yorkshire Water spokesman said it had taken a call regarding pods of foam on the Ouse.

“A team went out to check that our sewer system was not at fault and nothing was found,” he said.

Comments(8)

MarkyMarkMark says...
12:16pm Wed 22 Aug 12

A very slow news day, perhaps?

Suds seen on Monday. Reported in Press on Wednesday that there was no apparent cause in the water treatment works.

Is there a story here somewhere? I'm not getting it....

E=MC^2 says...
12:40pm Wed 22 Aug 12

Did anyone from YW contact the Environment Agency - don‘t they deal with river pollution incidents?? So did nobody get a sample and analyse what this was and so help identify its source and whether any effects on environment etc? etc?

Scarlet Pimpernel says...
1:14pm Wed 22 Aug 12

This seems to happen in late August and September, as I have seen it for the last two years. The lumps of foam have the appearance of lumps of polystyrene, and look like mini-icebergs !

A friend who works for the Environment Agency said it has something to do with peat coming through the river system, and the 'suds' form when water froths at weirs upstream. I wonder if it has anything to do with land being ploughed after harvest, and particles of loosened peat being washed into drainage ditches which then discharge into the river system ?

alfie says...
2:21pm Wed 22 Aug 12

Scarlet Pimpernel wrote:
This seems to happen in late August and September, as I have seen it for the last two years. The lumps of foam have the appearance of lumps of polystyrene, and look like mini-icebergs !

A friend who works for the Environment Agency said it has something to do with peat coming through the river system, and the 'suds' form when water froths at weirs upstream. I wonder if it has anything to do with land being ploughed after harvest, and particles of loosened peat being washed into drainage ditches which then discharge into the river system ?
Yawn...interesting that is....zzzzz

brahma says...
2:43pm Wed 22 Aug 12

@MarkyMarkMark: funny you should ask that. As this NIB reads it does seem a low impact story, but what I saw and photographed on Monday morning was really quite disturbing in the absence of any explanation. The scale seemed pretty impressive too. You can see the pics on my flickr stream at
http://www.flickr.co
m/photos/61081643@N0
5/7837925170/in/phot
ostream/
As for the lack of timeliness, I photographed the effluent on my way to work on Monday, spoke to Yorkshire Water who could not enlighten me as to what the cause was, and emailed the press newsdesk all before 08:45. It then took another 24 hours for me to deliver the pics as the press does not have the ability to upload RAW files from a Sony camera, and their firewall defeated my efforts to email them. The result was that I delivered them as jpegs on a CD yesterday morning.

brahma says...
2:46pm Wed 22 Aug 12

alfie wrote:
Scarlet Pimpernel wrote:
This seems to happen in late August and September, as I have seen it for the last two years. The lumps of foam have the appearance of lumps of polystyrene, and look like mini-icebergs !

A friend who works for the Environment Agency said it has something to do with peat coming through the river system, and the 'suds' form when water froths at weirs upstream. I wonder if it has anything to do with land being ploughed after harvest, and particles of loosened peat being washed into drainage ditches which then discharge into the river system ?
Yawn...interesting that is....zzzzz
Ignore that oaf Alfie, Scarlet Pimpernel, what you say IS interesting and may explain this phenomenon.

xtc says...
7:34am Thu 23 Aug 12

I was going to ask for tickets but then read it again to relies it said suds and not Suggs!

Windy says...
12:40pm Thu 23 Aug 12

I saw this Monday morning and thought it must have been a result of kids with washing liquid or something. It really did look like mini icebergs!

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