I would be swimming along and realise that ahead of me on this lovely flat,
beautiful looking water was a slick of filth, a slick of dirty,
muddy, mucky water with kind of with bits in it and I just didn't know, I had no idea what that was.
We had a few guys go down pretty badly with the Eucalype string so I mean this morning I was throwing up and I really wasn't sure
that there was going to be a chance for me to be in the boat but yeah it would have been ideal not to have so much,
so I was pulling the water.
I'm not exaggerating somebody is going to die because of this pathogen level so we have in the rivers and nobody seems to be interested in it.
Welcome to LSE IQ, the podcast where we are social scientists and other experts to answer one intelligent question.
I'm Joanna Bale from the IQ team.
We work with academics to bring you their latest research and ideas and talk to people affected by the issues we explore.
In this episode I ask why are our rivers and seas polluted by sewage?
Clean water and effective sanitation is essential to human life,
yet every water and wastewater company in England and Wales is under criminal investigation amid allegations of widespread illegal sewage dumping.
Some have already paid out millions of pounds in fines and the biggest,
Thames Water, is on the brink of financial collapse.
It's a scandal of huge national significance that affects every single one of us
because it's threatening our water supply and devastating our rivers and seas.
I wanted to find out why this crisis has developed and how we can clean it up.
We'll find out who really owns our water,
the difference between bread and water when it comes to selling them in an open market and why government plans to tackle the crisis might not work.