ResilienTogether is creating a Smart Catchment using innovations in technology and practices to reduce flood risk, enhance the water environment and improve community resilience in the Pix Brook catchment.
ResilienTogether undertook water quality sampling for a nine month period at eight sites along the Pix Brook. Pix Piece ~01 provides information on how we undertook our water quality sampling. This provided a baseline water quality for a range of determinants across a long stretch of the watercourse, which allowed us to build up a picture of where different determinants may be an issue and why. This Pix Piece focuses on the Total Petroleum Hydrocarbons (TPH), where they have been detected and where they come from.
Read more about our Total Petroleum Hydrocarbons, and their affects on the Pix Brook: Pix Brook Water Quality: Total Petroleum Hydrocarbons – Pix Piece #01
Total petroleum hydrocarbons (TPH) is a term used to describe a large family of chemical compounds that originally come from crude oil and are made up of hydrogen and carbon. Crude oil is used to make petroleum products for fuelling cars such as petrol and diesel.
For the most part, the amount of TPH in the Pix Brook is too low to be detected. However, at the outfall from the industrial estate in Letchworth, TPH was frequently detected with a high concentration. This shows that road runoff from Letchworth or potentially spilled oil is being carried into the Pix Brook at this point. Luckily, at present this isn’t increasing the concentration of TPH downstream and isn’t causing any issues.
Sustainable drainage systems (SuDS) such as swales and retention ponds can help to reduce TPH in rivers by collecting and filtering urban and road run off, preventing pollutants from entering our watercourses.