Love the Lee - Save the River

 Email received Thames 21:

Dear all,

We have miset of water quality testing results and they are poor yet again. We get the dissolved oxygen results on the day (yesterday) with the chemical results to follow later in the week.

The top line is that the Lea from south of Tottenham Lock to the Olympic site is has below the level that fish populations (and other creatures) can survive in healthy numbers. Only the species that can tolerate low levels of oxygen survive, and even then in much lower numbers.

6 mg of oxygen per litre is needed for a river to be considered healthy. As you can see from the table below it is way below that at many sites. Anything below 2 mg and no fish will live there for any reasonable period of time. Site X is just off the Lea, where the sewage outfall from Deephams enters from the Pymmes Brook (more on the Pymmes Brook in another email, we did a site visit last week and its condition is shocking).

No.	Site.	10/10/2011
1	Bow Locks	5.57
2	Olympics	3.46
3	Lea Bank	3.76
4	Mabley Green	2.69
5	North Millfields	1.96
6	Watermint Quay	1.84
7	Ferry Lane Estate	2.11
X	Pymmes Brook	2.50
9	N of Tott. Lock	4.42

The Hackney Gazette ran a story about Love the Lea last week – here’s the link river lee pollution levels 

The fear is that the Lea rarely gets above 3 mg/l meaning the river never recovers. Occasional dips a river can cope with, but this seems the opposite.

The ‘Love the Lea’ word is getting out there. More people have heard about it, more people are signing up.

I’m in the process of drawing up the next stage of the campaign that will allow us to focus on the larger scale underlying problems that need to be sorted – the Mega Pledge!

Kind regards,

Theo Thomas.

Love the Lee – Save the River!

Thames21

www.thames21.org.uk/LovetheLee