With Thames Water again in the news, I'm hoping the people of Chiswick will lend their support to a campaign to stop the company's plan to dump treated sewage in the last stretch of the non-tidal Thames. The so-called Teddington Direct River Abstraction project in Richmond and Kingston would see the company extract up to 75 million litres a water a day from the Thames in times of drought and replace it with treated sewage.  This will raise pollution levels upstream of Teddington Weir, a part of the river which has recently been designated London's first official bathing water place.  It will involve four to six years of massive disruption to residents while new plant is built at the Mogden sewage works and a 3.5 metre diameter pipeline is bored along a 4-kilometre route from there to the sewage outlet in Ham. The proposals have been taken out of the hands of the local authorities and will now go to the national Planning Inspectorate next year.  In the mean time, the Save Our Lands And River action group has launched a parliamentary petition calling for U.K. sewage treatment to be raised to the standards being adopted in Europe.  This would make the proposals illegal as the effluent returned to the river would not meet the higher standards. We have garnered just short of 50,000 signatures, but need many, many more.  Please help us by signing the petition: https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/763721

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