Newcastle University

The attached document shows several years of water quality data collected for the River Ouseburn, Newcastle Upon Tyne.

The data shows clear sources of chronic faecal contamination arising from larger sewer outfalls. Most of the data was taken in spring and summer and reflect faecal contamination at lower flows.

Shorter periods of study have also shown that there are high levels of faecal contamination observed at higher flows. This contamination could be caused the sewer outfall itself or by the operation of Combined Sewer Overflows during larger storm events.

Thanks must go to the Undergraduates project over the last 4 years who collected the field data.

The environmental laboratories in the School of Civil Engineering are used for all measurements. The laboratory support team and supervisor have greatly helped with this work.

A small amount of funding from the Environment Agency has helped this work to continue.

The excellent work of Matt Rennee (MEng) in continuing the work and putting together all the data for the last few years is greatly appreciated.

The reader should accept that this is an undergraduate thesis and that some of the views expressed are by the student and may not be fully substantiated. However, for the great part the work is of top quality and all the readings taken have been carefully sifted to make sure they are a fair account of the problem we observe in The River Ouseburn.

We have not attempted to comment on how bad the situation is or on what should be done about the river. However the need to clean all the rivers that are used by the Newcastle population should be addressed and I hope that this work could underpin any future initiative.

If you want to make use of the data please site the web address or contact me.

Paul Quinn 

p.f.quinn@ncl.ac.uk