Anglian Water pleaded guilty to charges under the Environment Act at Basildon Magistrates Court last week following a pollution incident at Ormesby Broad in 2018.

The incident was caused by a failure at the water company’s Decoy Road pumping station and resulted in the death of over 4000 fish.

Since the incident, Anglian Water said it has undertaken a radical review of its Water Recycling team and how they operate – a change in leadership, culture, processes and new investment.

Operational changes have included the introduction of a planned preventative maintenance programme across the region. This is helping to reduce blockages caused by unflushables alongside the installation of 40,000 sewer monitors, including two at Ormesby pumping station, to give early warnings of any problems arising within the sewer network so they can be dealt with before an incident occurs.

Further changes have been implemented to the cleaning schedule for the site, the alarms and the roll out of new AI technology to make sure equipment is performing well.

An Anglian Water spokesperson said:

“We acknowledge that our actions at Ormesby fell well below the high standard we set for ourselves. We care deeply about any impact we have on the environment and are sorry this event happened.

“We know there’s no room for complacency and agree that our performance must improve. Since this incident, six years ago, we have fundamentally changed how the Water Recycling side of the business operates. We’ve put in place new processes, invested in new technology and additional monitoring, including specifically at Ormesby, all of which are already working to minimise the risk of anything like this happening again.

“We equally want to see the improvements in our standards. An additional £100 million investment from our shareholders this year has allowed us to accelerate our work on reducing spills and pollutions. We are making progress in the right direction but there is still more work to do.”