OTTERS and other other wildlife in an Exmoor river were not harmed by an eight-day leak from a village sewage pipe, Wessex Water said.

Fears for the wildlife were raised in Timberscombe after sewage spilled from a manhole cover in a field next to the River Avill farmed by Oliver Hill.

A Wessex Water spokesman said the leak was contained to the field, did not impact the watercourse, and was repaired and cleaned up.

But West Somerset MP Ian Liddell-Grainger said it was ‘scandalous’ the sewage pipe had been reported leaking on several occasions by Mr Hill without sufficient action being taken.

Mr Liddell-Grainger said questions now needed to be asked of both Wessex Water and the Environment Agency, and he would be expecting answers.

He said: “The Environment Agency informed me of this appalling situation and although I have been assured by Wessex Water that this was ‘only’ dilute effluent and that the sewer is neither blocked or broken, clearly the system is inadequate to deal with the volumes of sewage it is supposed to be handling.

“If it had been the farmer who was causing the pollution the Environment Agency would have been down on him like a ton of bricks.

“But this is apparently yet another example of its policy of being hard on the soft targets, soft on the hard ones.

“The Avill valley is cherished and valued for its wildlife, including populations of fish, otters and kingfishers which live in or ailing the river itself.

“To put such wildlife in peril in this way is totally unacceptable.

“Farmers and landowners right across Somerset are rapidly getting fed up with the Environment Agency. 

“It is targeting their industry and demanding costly anti-pollution controls at the same time as it has been watching the water industry pollute rivers with excessively high amounts of phosphate from its inadequate sewage treatment plants.

“But what has been happening on the Avill appears to me to be nothing more or less than a scandalous dereliction of duty.”

The Wessex Water spokesperson said the incident was caused by a section of pipework becoming inundated with groundwater after heavy and prolonged rainfall.

Given the volume of water in the network and the groundwater levels after a wet winter, any discharge of sewage ‘would have been highly diluted’.

The spokesperson said: “We attended the site, spoke to the landowner, carried out remedial work, and have arranged to meet him again to discuss a long-term solution to this problem.

“We appreciate this is not the first time the landowner has experienced unpleasant flooding, so we will continue to work with him to investigate the causes and possible solutions.”

The company said more than £500,000 was spent last year improving multiple sections of pipe in the Timberscombe area and more work was planned for the near future.

Although Wessex Water was able to seal its sewers there were many miles of pipes which were privately owned where it did not have any powers to fix them.