There has been a pile of sandbags outside the Abingdon Water Treatment Works for some time. The bags were used in the winter floods. There is no report of there being anything like the dangers of flooding at Abingdon’s water treatment works as experienced elsewhere – and reported in the Not Abingdon Blog.
The Abingdon Water Treatment works had a recent upgrade in 2012 at a cost of £3m.
The Borough Records show that the Thames Conservancy started writing to Abingdon Corporation back in about 1867 requesting them to initiate measures to stop the flow of sewage into the River Thames at Abingdon Bridge and St Helen’s Church. They wrote again in 1869 asking what action was being taken. By 1873 the conservatory were threatening Abingdon with legal action to force compliance.
The Town Clerk, wrote back to explain that a Committee had been looking at the issue, and had visited various sewage treatment schemes nationally.
But in 1875 Abingdon Corporation decided to do take action sooner rather than later. The Corporation borrowed about £19K from the Public Works Loan Commission, purchased land from a farmer in Sutton Wick, and created the Sewage Farm, that has through numerous upgrades become the concrete clad chambers and towers that are there today. I guess that a Sewage Farm involved allowing sewage to settle over larger areas of land.
When I was a kid in the sixties, Sutton Fields estate, as it is now, was an open sewerage farm. Yes it stank from time to time, but we knew no better and just accepted it.
what a load of cr*p 🙂
My mate works in the sewerage industry. Every time I ask him how work is he says it’s “sh!t”
I remember being shown around when I did a biology course at college. Because Abingdon had the Pavlova leather factory all the sewage solids had to be buried because of the risk of anthrax spores coming down through the waste factory water. We do not seem to get the dreadful smell in south Abingdon that we did get in some year. It was particularly bad in hot summers when we had to shut the windows because of the smell. We wondered how the houses in the Marina coped with it.