ABSTRACT
‘The good news is, plant and animal life seem to be unharmed,’ says Paul. Your contractors have managed to clog a sewer pipe during building work. ‘It was a freak accident,’ he says. ‘They were filling a trench and some flowable fill got into a crack in the sewer pipe and clogged it up.’
The result was 15,000 gallons of wastewater spilling into the river for a four-hour period before someone noticed. The smell was pretty awful, apparently. It then took the council 12 hours to locate the blockage and fix it.
‘The Council say they’ve taken water samples from different points of the river to test for faecal bacteria, which is what you get in sewage,’ says Paul. ‘But the numbers are OK. The river has done a good job of dispersing it.’
‘But the bad news is, they’re going to sue.’ ‘How much?’ you ask. Paul shrugs. ‘Five figures maybe,’ he says.
