Southern Water Sewage Spills Hit Folkestone and Hythe as Sea-Swimming Health Concerns Grow

By Claire, guest contributor

I’ve got to the point where going anywhere near the sea seems to require three checks before leaving the house: what’s the weather doing, what’s the tide doing, and has the sewer network been overflowing again?

That’s a pretty depressing state of affairs when you live beside one of the best stretches of coastline in the country.

And this weekend, once again, Southern Water’s own figures make uncomfortable reading.

At Sunny Sands in Folkestone, Southern Water recorded a genuine “impacting release” beginning at 4.36pm on Saturday 29 August. It continued for five hours, ending at 9.37pm.

At Range Road in Hythe there were another two genuine impacting releases on the same day. One began at 12.34pm and lasted an hour. Just 17 minutes after it ended, another began at 1.51pm and continued for two hours and four minutes.

Go back two days and it gets worse.

On 27 August, Range Road K Long recorded a genuine release lasting six hours and 48 minutes. Range Road K Short recorded two further genuine releases, lasting seven minutes and five minutes.

Add those Folkestone and Hythe events together and Southern Water recorded 15 hours and four minutes of genuine impacting releases across just 27 and 29 August.

That doesn’t mean sewage was pouring continuously onto one beach for more than 15 hours. These were separate events from different outfalls. But equally, these weren’t theoretical warnings. Southern Water’s own system recorded actual storm-overflow activity which it considered capable of affecting water quality.

Further along the coast around Rye, Winchelsea Road Rye B recorded a release lasting nine hours and 20 minutes on 29 August, while Cricket Salts Rye recorded another lasting one hour and three minutes.

Those two were still marked “Under Review”, so I don’t think it would be responsible to call them confirmed pollution events yet.

St Margarets Terrace Rye is different. Its 21-minute release on 27 August was recorded as genuine.

There’s also understandable concern about the drainage network around Rye, East Guldeford and the Guldeford Sewer. Water doesn’t politely respect council boundaries or parish signs. It moves through drains, ditches, sewers, rivers and tidal waters before eventually reaching the sea.

But I think it’s important to be precise. The spill records above identify specific Southern Water outfalls. They don’t, by themselves, prove that every one of those releases travelled through the Guldeford Sewer. Where evidence exists, we should say so. Where it doesn’t, we shouldn’t stretch it.

What is beyond doubt is that storm-overflow warnings have become an uncomfortably familiar part of life along this coast.

Rain comes down, the alerts appear, and swimmers, paddleboarders, sailors, anglers and families are left wondering what has gone into the water.

We’re slowly normalising something which shouldn’t feel normal at all.

Storm overflows exist because much of Britain’s sewerage network combines rainwater and domestic wastewater in the same pipes. When heavy rain overwhelms the system, overflows can discharge the excess rather than allowing sewage to back up into homes, businesses and streets.

Fair enough. Nobody wants sewage coming up through their downstairs toilet.

But that doesn’t make what comes out at the other end harmless.

A storm-overflow discharge can contain heavily diluted wastewater, but it can also contain untreated human sewage and the bacteria, viruses and other microorganisms that go with it.

And once we’re talking about faecal contamination of bathing water, this stops being just an environmental issue. It becomes a public-health one.

UKHSA’s guidance is pretty plain about that.

Open-water swimming can expose people to gastrointestinal illnesses causing diarrhoea and vomiting, as well as skin, ear, eye and respiratory infections. UKHSA identifies organisms including norovirus, Giardia and Cryptosporidium and also warns about potentially more serious infections including E. coli O157 and leptospirosis.

There’s a particularly relevant bit of UKHSA advice whenever we’re talking about storm overflows: heavy rainfall can wash harmful bacteria from sewage, agricultural land and urban areas into rivers, seas and bathing waters.

That’s also why the Environment Agency routinely tests designated bathing waters for E. coli and intestinal enterococci.

They’re used as indicators of faecal contamination.

Finding them doesn’t tell you automatically whether that contamination came from a sewer, livestock, wildlife, surface water or another source. Nor does somebody developing an E. coli infection after swimming prove the sea caused it.

But neither does the absence of proven causation mean the health risk isn’t real.

That distinction matters.

I also wanted to know what East Kent’s hospitals are actually seeing when it comes to some of the organisms people immediately associate with contaminated water.

The latest trust-level mandatory surveillance data for East Kent Hospitals University NHS Foundation Trust, covering the 12 months to June 2026, record 525 E. coli bacteraemia cases, 185 Klebsiella bacteraemia cases and 72 Pseudomonas aeruginosa bacteraemia cases.

Of those, 108 E. coli cases, 40 Klebsiella cases and 32 Pseudomonas cases were classified as hospital-onset.

That’s 782 reported Gram-negative bloodstream infection episodes across the three organisms in 12 months.

But there’s an important warning attached to those figures.

They don’t mean 782 people caught infections from swimming in the sea. But some would have without realising it possibly

They don’t mean 525 people caught E. coli from Folkestone, Hythe or anywhere else along the coast. But some would have without realising it possibly

They’re laboratory-confirmed bloodstream infection episodes reported by the hospital trust. E. coli bacteraemia can arise from urinary tract infections and numerous other sources. Klebsiella and Pseudomonas also have many possible routes of infection.

Nor does “782 cases” necessarily mean 782 separate individuals. Surveillance systems count infection episodes, not a deduplicated list of named patients.

That’s why I wouldn’t describe these figures as “people infected by sewage”. The evidence simply doesn’t allow it.

But they do demonstrate something important: these are real organisms producing substantial numbers of serious infections in our local health system.

There’s another bacteria worth mentioning: intestinal enterococci.

You won’t see it on that hospital chart because it would be misleading to put it there.

Intestinal enterococci are routinely measured in bathing-water monitoring because they indicate faecal contamination. UKHSA doesn’t publish an equivalent East Kent Hospitals series showing “people made ill by intestinal enterococci after swimming”.

Inventing such a comparison would make a dramatic graph but dreadful journalism.

What’s frustrating is that Southern Water comes to all of this with a history.

In July this year the company was fined £7.1m at Canterbury crown court following an Environment Agency prosecution over repeated illegal sewage pollution incidents in Kent.

That came after the enormous £90m fine imposed on Southern Water in 2021 over 6,971 illegal sewage discharges across Kent, Hampshire and Sussex.

Those prosecutions are separate from the storm-overflow releases recorded this weekend. I’m not suggesting that an overflow is automatically illegal merely because it operated.

Storm overflows can discharge lawfully under environmental permits.

But history matters when a water company asks coastal communities to trust its infrastructure, its warnings and its explanations.

And it matters to swimmers too.

We’re constantly told to take responsibility for ourselves. Check pollution alerts. Avoid swallowing water. Cover cuts. Wash after swimming. Seek medical advice if we become ill and tell the doctor we’ve recently been swimming in open water.

That’s sensible advice.

But there’s something slightly backwards about making the swimmer the final line of defence against a sewerage infrastructure problem.

I don’t expect the English Channel to be sterile.

It’s a living sea, not a municipal swimming pool.

I do expect, in 2026, to be able to look at a rainy weekend without immediately wondering how many hours the sewer network is going to spend discharging into the waters around us.

For Folkestone, Hythe, Rye and communities right along this coast, that really shouldn’t be too much to ask.

If you’ve experienced illness or an infection after swimming in the sea and subsequently needed antibiotics, please do get in touch with us at TheShepwayVoxTeam@proton.me.

The Shepway Vox Team

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