12 October 2021 Trout in the Trym Notes

Notes from the Last Meeting 12 October 2021
At the Trout in the Trym steering group meeting we agreed that the next activities would be:

1.  Identify known places where there are known pollution events and develop processes for these to be fully resolved.  This would involve appropriate timely reporting to the appropriate organisations, identifying people to monitor the sites and establishing the exact point at which the pollution entered the river.  It is thought there are about four of these in the river system that we know about.

2.  Build a network of people to monitor the whole system.  This would be done after activity 1 was complete so that the monitors would have proven processes for reporting and investigating problems.  (Likely to involve liaison with Wessex Water as we may look to build a complete map of input into the river.)

3. Yellow Fish, that is persuading people not to put inappropriate things down drains and thence into the river, ‘drains for rain’.  There is a river group in Manchester that is working on materials for schools for this.  Theo suggested that we might be the ‘river group’ in the South that trialled the materials and managed their use in the South of England.  

We are also investigating how trout might be helped to move into Hazel Brook at the confluence and how the silt traps in Blaise might be cleaned up and provide a decent environment.