Ruscombe Brook meeting

Last week - infact last Tuesday - time flies - I am not being able to keep this blog as comprehensively up to date as in the past - no matter alot of the stuff still makes it into this blog in some shape.....

Photo: Some of RBAG at meeting last week

...anyway I've already covered our discussion re Hamwell Leaze and Dudbridge Playing Fields yesterday...what else?

Julian Jones of Water 21 reported to the group from his work ‘Options for Developing the Ruscombe Brook Partnership – Report for RBAG’. It is not huge but would swamp this blog so if folk are interested please get in touch...it looks at one way of moving forward to develop a comprehensive plan for the brook.

The two other documents also in current circulation to RBAG members are a summary report to RBAG from Ismaila Emahi of his MSc study ‘Environmental Quality, Stakeholder Perceptions and Sustainable Solutions – the case of Sewage Pollution in Ruscombe Brook, Stroud’ and Julian Jones original report from some years ago entitled, ‘Developing and Demonstrating an Exemplar of Innovative, Holistic, Least Cost Alleviation of Flooding Consequences’ – a DEFRA pilot. Again interested parties should get in touch - we hope to also have a full paper copy of Ismailas' report available.

There was much discussion at the meeting of a number of topics relating to these reports including the following - do contact for further info as these notes may not be sufficient if you are less familiar with the project:
· the question of permission to carry out any works that might be required from SDC and/or EA
· The need for reed beds to be higher up the brook than Hamwell Leaze
· Sending out the MSc study report to a wider audience
· RBAG does still not have a plan of what works are required and where. ‘Something’ needed further up the brook
· What is the role of the Group at this point? Does RBAG want to be just commissioners, or direct managers of a system? Is RBAG in a position to take on major responsibilities in relation to sewage management? What does the group want to do?
· RBAG now has some excellent tools to hand, including the MSc study, the Memorandum of Co-operation, the DEFRA pilot, Julian’s Report etc. The problems with the Brook that were originally identified are still the same, but now the group has the evidence to prove that they were right.
· Water 21 has given the group the big overview, but there are many small common-sense solutions that can be put in place simply and cheaply – some of these can be the responsibility of STW

The group agreed to go back to the original strategy document that listed all the problems and the range of possible solutions. and update that in the light of the new information from reports. A mini-group of us will meet before Christmas but we also plan to research more the model of Social Entrepreneurship - I have to confess a little frustration at the speed of things - in some ways we seem to be where we were a year ago - however that is not true - much has been achieved and we also now have the info necessary to move forward to the next stage.

Also only one major sewage incident in over 6 months plus Severn Trent Water are still working to improve the situation further:
· Flow monitoring to establish pipe capacity especially in heavy rainfall
· Manhole survey to show where the surcharges are occurring
· Computer modelling
· Relining the sewer in key places

Although the group was very disappointed to get further feedback re the serious incident in September when raw sewage ran into the Randwick tributary for 3 days. The land owner had been working independently with STW to get procedures in place for dealing with incidents on her land. It appears these procedures completely broke down: a meeting was arranged to discuss this but has had to be rearranged to the new year - I hope at that meeting we can ensure that break down does not occur again.

The land owner noted that she had put in a cattle drinking area to address the poaching problem (use search facility to see photos of this and more details), but this had been washed away in the summer floods. It was also noted that members and others had delivered most of the 3,500 – 4,000 RBAG leaflets to people locally.

Next meeting: Tuesday 22nd January. 7.30 pm. Contact me for details.