LONDON - Environment activists will on Tuesday stir up a stink about the pollution of London's River Thames with raw sewage.
Two teams of rowers wearing gas masks and each towing a giant inflatable representing faeces will race each other down the River, to protest what they see as a lack of investment in London's antiquated sewers.
Rowers Against Tideway Sewage (RATS) and Surfers Against Sewage (SAS) will then present a petition to the department of the environment demanding that the city gets a new sewage system as part of a five year spending plan to be finalised next month.
"There is no investment planned to tackle the storm sewer overflows which can dump thousands of tonnes of raw sewage into the Thames as many as 60 times a year," RATS team spokesman Anatole Beams said.
The river that winds its way through the centre of the city of seven million people now prides itself on being the cleanest urban waterway in Europe after being declared dead in the 1960s.
But extreme weather events such as torrential downpours overwhelm the city's 1840s-built sewage system, forcing the authorities to open the sluice gates into the river.
In August this year a major rainstorm flooded the combined sewage and storm water system forcing 600,000 tonnes of untreated sewage into the river and killing thousands of fish.
A report in October last year said up to one quarter of the city's brickwork sewers were either leaking severely or on the verge of collapse.
REUTERS NEWS SERVICE
