Hay's Way meets with a head ghillie and residents concerned with sewage leaks in the River Tweed
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00:00 [Music]
00:19 Hi, Catherine A here, Rural Affairs Correspondent at the Scotsman.
00:23 Hayes Way has made it to Melrose in the Borders.
00:27 I'm just here on the River Tweed, which you can see and probably hear just behind me.
00:32 And I'm about to go and meet two guys who work on the river.
00:35 One is a ghillie, Scott, and the other, a concerned local resident, Cameron,
00:41 because they have issues with sewage leaking into the river.
00:46 We've got the... there's a sewage pipe that runs from Gattonside under the river
00:53 to the Melrose sewage works effectively.
00:56 And it has run and leaked for years and years.
01:01 Mostly there's a problem when there's lots of rain and there's lots of water coming down the pipes.
01:06 But this winter specifically, it ran from December through to March.
01:10 And I think, you know, one of the reasons we're talking to you, Catherine,
01:12 is because we're just concerned that... I'm not saying people don't take it seriously,
01:18 but certainly the responses we have been getting from the likes of SEPA and Scottish Water
01:24 have been less than satisfactory.
01:26 And very shortly, this... it'll be the summer holidays,
01:31 very shortly, not only will there be fishers here,
01:34 there will be hundreds of children and families picnicking and bathing.
01:38 And if it rains before that, there'll be sewage leaking out of here into the river.
01:42 There will be sewage coming down the storm outflow above the chain bridge.
01:48 And there'll be another one at the top of the beach.
01:50 And that's just in half a mile of one river, in one little bit of Scotland.
01:55 How big is that if one takes it across the whole of the Tweed and all Scotland's other iconic salmon lakes?
02:00 Scottish Water have a contractor who does something,
02:03 and then they have a subcontractor who does something else.
02:06 And the teams that turn up, yes, they do what they have been instructed to do,
02:12 even though we know that what they're doing will be less than effective.
02:16 And also, no names, no factual, they will also confess that they know
02:21 what they're doing will be less than effective or indeed fail,
02:25 but the fact is they are just doing what they've been asked to do.
02:29 There's no one willing to kind of take full responsibility for this.
02:34 That's exactly it. We've asked John Lamont,
02:37 "Can John put us in touch with or get us a meeting with somebody
02:44 who is accountable so that we can put this thing to bed once and for all
02:48 so it doesn't just drag on?"
02:50 And we don't want to be bothering our MPs and MSPs on a regular basis.
02:55 We just want it solved. And we want a clean river and a clean environment.
03:00 And if this was, you know, this is our lawn, this is our ghillie's place of work.
03:05 If this was your lawn outside your office, would you want sewage bubbling up through it on a regular basis?
03:12 To the extent that the puddle, the pond gets so big, little children see ducks swimming in it,
03:20 think it's a pond and come and paddle in it, which is just completely unacceptable.
03:24 Yeah. And as you say, with the rush of summer approaching,
03:28 what did you say to John Lamont in your last letter then?
03:31 We asked John if he might get hold of whoever at Scottish Water
03:39 was in a position of responsibility and accountability to come and sit down and tell us,
03:46 "OK, we have a plan to solve this." But as yet we've heard nothing.
03:51 You've heard nothing. OK, so what's the next move?
03:53 The next move is we will just keep bothering our MPs and our MSPs and the council.
04:03 We are not going to let this go because the situation is only going to get worse.
04:07 So it needs to be addressed.
04:09 We would like to see the whole river protected. The whole river needs it.
04:13 The infrastructure throughout the whole of the border towns is antiquated.
04:18 They've not really invested. They've done bits and pieces, but nothing major.
04:23 Villages are growing yearly. So please, please do something about the sewage problem.
04:30 And we're now just filling it with sewage on a daily basis.
04:33 There's kids in swimming in it. There's kids jumping in sewage puddles.
04:37 It's just, come on.
04:39 You've been a ghillie here for 21 years. How long has this been going on for?
04:45 21 years. You complain, they come out, they have a look, they clean it.
04:49 But the problem just keeps happening and keeps happening.
04:52 We've now got four places on this two-mile section that there's raw sewage coming in.
04:57 And we're one beat out of 60 or 70 beats. So we're having on most of it.
05:03 Should there not be legislation, as soon as there's more than five houses new getting built,
05:08 that either a very small treatment works or a very large septic tank or something,
05:12 to stop it getting discharged in these storm overflows and just straight into the river.
05:17 If people actually knew how bad the quality was, they'd probably never come here.
05:22 We need every river board, every ghillie, everybody just to non-stop bring it to the public eye, continually.
05:29 If it's here long enough, then they have to sit up and take notes.
05:33 Yeah, well you'd think 20 years would be long enough.
05:35 You would think so.
05:36 When I was up in the northeast, the River Dee is really steep decline in salmon there,
05:45 in Atlantic salmon, and I witnessed first hand the impact this decline in fishing tourism is having on local villages around.
05:53 Bancory was really struggling, fishing hotels closing, others having to fill rooms at cheap rates,
06:00 with predominantly workmen from cities further south coming up doing jobs.
06:08 It's certainly eye opening that this decline in this one species not only impacts the river ecosystem,
06:17 because obviously you have otters, I just earlier saw an osprey carrying a fish, it was huge, so I think it was a female.
06:24 And not only is the decline in this fish impacting the animals that feed off them,
06:31 but you have jobs and rural communities that have kind of pried themselves on the fishing community
06:40 and run really on fishing tourism, rely on it.
06:45 You see them struggling and it just makes you think, you know, what's it going to take for people in government
06:56 to act with more urgency than how they've been acting at the moment.
07:04 [water flowing]
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