You Can Only Kill the Fish Once!

A former employee of the UK's Environmental Agency, says its officers are demoralised by instructions to ignore some calls about river pollution from the public (https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/aug/29/environment-agency-tells-staff-to-ignore-river-pollution-complaints-age-of-extinction). The Environmental Agency has responsibility for looking after the health of English rivers and lakes. Many such UK waterways are seriously damaged by effluent. This is largely sewage from privatised Water Companies and 'run-off' from 'factory' farming (especially of chickens). Industrial pollution is also sometimes a culprit. The former Environmental Agency employee, maintains that staff are instructed to ignore calls about 'lower impact' (categories 3 and 4) events. As she points out, once a river has been damaged, it becomes much harder to have a major incident on it. Major incidents (categories 1 and 2) are signalled by seeing lots of dead fish on the water surface. The fauna of damaged rivers, however, takes a long time to recover. The fish can only be killed once. Lack of action, following 'lower impact pollution events', means the health of UK rivers will continue on a downward spiral.