British triathletes preparing for next month’s world championships have been forced to abandon open water swim training because of sewage in the sea off the coast of Lancashire.
Adam Diver, along with his teammates Richard Addison and Paul Bamber, will represent Great Britain at the World Triathlon Championship finals in Pontevedra, Spain, on 22-24 September.
Diver said of the pollution: “It is horrible and it is upsetting. You can smell it as well, especially on hot days, you can smell the sewage.”
While other teams will probably be preparing by swimming in open water, Diver and his teammates, who are all from Fleetwood, Lancashire, have to use an indoor pool. Not being able to train in the sea is “massive”, said Diver, a former Army captain who recently became the first person on record to swim from England to the Isle of Man.
He explained: “You need to replicate what you will experience in the competition, you need to get muscle memory, you need to understand the dynamics of open water swimming. It’s a different sort of swimming so you’ve got to have a different technique, you’ve got to train differently. It is going to impact on us massively.”
Diver said that the pollution is not just affecting his team’s training. There was a bigger picture, he said, with tourism and the whole community affected by not being able to swim in the sea.
After Diver’s remarkable Isle of Man achievement, he had been planning another marathon challenge by swimming the length of the River Wyre in Lancashire. But he said: “We’ve had to postpone it because it is too dangerous. I’ve been advised I would be risking my health if I swam in it.”
Diver is involved in planning a national day of protest over sewage in Britain’s seas and rivers on 14 October. He said the problem urgently needs addressing.
“There are a couple of fishermen who’ve been out and told us it looks like it is getting worse,” he said.
“I’ve just been on the app now and there are sewage alerts for the whole Lancashire coast. This is a daily occurrence now. It is getting to the point where it is just the norm now.”
The sewage problems are largely the result of treatment plants struggling to cope with heavy rainfall. When rainfall reaches a certain level, water companies are allowed to discharge sewage overflow into rivers and seas.
A spokesperson for the north-west England water company United Utilities said: “Met Office figures show that this July has been the wettest on record in Lancashire.
“Over the last 30 years, we have made major investment along the Fylde coast to provide high-quality sewage treatment and to reduce the impact of storm overflows during heavy rain, bringing huge improvements to bathing waters. We plan to build on this with further investment across the north-west to meet the new requirements of the Environment Act.”
The Environment Agency said it was working hard to protect and improve bathing waters by regulating and holding polluters to account.
A spokesperson said: “We are absolutely clear that polluting our seas and rivers is unacceptable and we will take tough action against companies which break the rules.”
