Human faeces and toilet paper seen on Tadley footpath near Bishopswood Schools following heavy rainfall

Human faeces and toilet paper were seen on a footpath in Tadley last week after heavy rainfall caused raw sewage to spill onto the walkway.

The footpath, which is located between Elmhurst and Bishopswood Infant and Junior Schools and has a small stream running parallel along with it, has been a frequent site of sewer spillage over the past few years, and local residents are fed up.

Gemma Blakey, 31, of Stratfield Avenue, reported the spillage after walking along the path with her two young children on their way to the shops on Monday, January 2.

She said: “I noticed that there was a big puddle ahead of us and I wasn’t really paying that much attention so I just walked through it with my three-year-old who was walking and my one-year-old who was in the buggy.

“As we were walking through the puddle, I noticed a poo and I noticed toilet paper and at that point, it was too late. We were already walking through it. I was so disgusted by it.”

After the incident, Mrs Blakey, who has lived in the area for nearly two years, did some digging within local Facebook groups and discovered that the spillages had been an ongoing issue for some time. She found four different instances of flooding since October 2021.

She said: “Why has nobody done anything about this yet? If Thames Water are very unwilling to do something about it then it needs to be escalated.

“It even needs to be escalated within the local media or via the Environment Agency, or ideally both."

Michelle Hicks, 36, has lived in Elmhurst for ten years, but she only became aware of the flooding when her son started to attend Bishopswood school three years ago.

She said she thought it was just water until June 2021, when her six-year-old Noah spent five days in hospital with Campylobacteriosis, a bacterial diarrhoeal disease that is caused by contact with or consumption of contaminated food or water.

Mrs Hicks believes he could have picked up the disease when walking along the flooded path to school.

She said: “Obviously we can’t guarantee it came from the water, but the rest of us in the house didn’t get ill.

“When it rains we just know we have to walk a different way to school which triples the length of our journey.

“It feels like we just have to put up with it. Our children just have to walk through sewage to get to school, or we walk like a mile long to get around it.

“It’s just not right, it shouldn’t be happening and it’s just not safe.”

Mrs Hicks and Mrs Blakey both believe that the whole drainage system needs to be updated for the continuing problem to be solved, but they think that Thames Water is unwilling to do so because of how much it would cost.

Mrs Blakey said: “This will happen again. Anytime there is heavy rainfall this problem will happen again.

“You can pump all you like but if you don’t fix the root cause of the problem then this will keep happening. There is zero proactivity as far as I can see in this case.

“As far as I see it, raw sewage anywhere that is not in a drain is unacceptable.

“However, raw sewage being released repeatedly over a number of years next to a school where families walk their kids is not only a public health risk, it is quite frankly disgusting. Nobody is sensing that this is not right.”

Thames Water have confirmed that the site has since been cleaned and teams were on site on Tuesday to assess the situation for any further work.