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A Massive Effort Is Underway to Rid the Baltic Sea of Sunken Bombs

News Feed
Tuesday, September 10, 2024

Germany’s North and Baltic Seas are littered with munitions from the First and Second World Wars, such as shells—as shown here—once fired from German battleships. SeaTerra Aboard the Alkor, a 180-foot oceanographic vessel anchored in the Baltic Sea a few miles from the German port city of Kiel, engineer Henrik Schönheit grips a joystick-like lever in his fist. He nudges the lever up, and a one-of-a-kind robotic sea crawler about the size of a two-seat golf cart responds, creeping forward along the seafloor on rubber caterpillar tracks 40 feet below the ship. As the crawler inspects Kiel Bay’s sandy terrain, a live video stream beams up to a computer screen in a cramped room aboard the ship. The picture is so crystalline that it’s possible to count the tentacles of a translucent jellyfish floating past the camera. A scrum of scientists and technicians ooh and aah as they huddle around the screen, peering over Schönheit’s shoulder. The bright-yellow robot is the Norppa 300, the newest fabrication of the explosive ordnance disposal company SeaTerra, which operates out of northern Germany. SeaTerra’s co-founder Dieter Guldin rates as one of Europe’s canniest experts on salvaging sunken explosives. Now, after years of experience clearing the seafloor of hazards for commercial operations, and campaigning the German government for large-scale remediation, SeaTerra is one of three companies participating in the first-ever mission to systematically clear munitions off a seafloor in the name of environmental protection. The arduous and exacting process of removing and destroying more than 1.6 million tons of volatile munitions from the Baltic and North Sea basins—an area roughly the size of West Virginia—is more urgent by the day: The weapons, which have killed hundreds of people who have come into accidental contact with them in the past, are now corroded. Their casings are breaking apart and releasing carcinogens into the seas. Onboard the Alkor, during a test run this May, SeaTerra technicians Klaus-Dieter Golla, left, and Henrik Schönheit discuss video footage of the seafloor transmitted by the company’s Norppa 300 robot. Andreas Muenchbach SeaTerra’s top technicians aboard the Alkor are testing the Norppa 300’s basic functions in the wild prior to the project’s start this month, in early September 2024: ensuring that its steering, sonar imaging of the seafloor, chemical sampler and video feed are fine-tuned. Everyone huddled in the ship’s dry lab watches rapt as the crawler bumps up against a vaguely rectangular object the size of a bar fridge. It’s largely obscured by seaweed and, from the looks of it, home to a lone Baltic flounder that’s swimming around the base. Aaron Beck, senior scientist at the Geomar Helmholtz Center for Ocean Research, a German marine research institute working alongside SeaTerra, identifies it as an ammunition crate. “Look, the flatness there, the corner. That’s not of the natural world,” he exclaims. Dumped munitions lie in waters around the world but are ubiquitous in German waters. In the aftermath of World War II, all the conflict parties, including the United Kingdom, Russia, Japan and the United States, had to divest themselves of armaments. “They didn’t want [them] on land, and facilities to destroy [them] were too few,” explains Anita Künitzer of the German Environment Agency. Dumping at sea, a practice held over from World War I, was the obvious choice. In occupied Germany, British forces established underwater disposal zones—one of which lies near Kiel Bay. “But,” says Guldin, “on their way to the designated dumping grounds, they also just threw hardware overboard.” Grainy black-and-white film footage shows British sailors busily operating multiple conveyor belts to cast crate after crate of leftovers into the sea. Whole ships and submarines packed with live munitions were scuttled in the rush to disarm the Germans. 1500 Miles Of Bombs Along Our Roads Aka Ammunition Dumps Or Arms Dump (1946) Experts estimate that a ginormous 1.8 million tons of conventional munitions and another 5,500 tons of chemical weapons lie decomposing off Germany alone in the North and Baltic Seas, most from World War II. (Because of its busy ports, the North Sea received four times as much as the Baltic.) If all that weaponry were lined up, it would stretch from Paris to Moscow, about 1,500 miles! “Nowhere in German waters is there a square kilometer of seabed without munitions,” says Guldin. In the postwar decades, freelancing scrap metal collectors hauled explosives and other valuable wartime debris ashore to hawk on the metals market. Fisher boats that ensnared unexploded munitions in their nets were required to turn them in to coastal authorities, not toss them overboard again. The German Navy’s anti-mine units attempted to clear some of the mess, usually through initiating underwater explosions, but lacked the proper equipment to tackle the problem systematically. Only when the private sector picked up operations did a whole new suite of technology and skill sets emerge. Since the late 2000s, SeaTerra’s ensemble of marine biologists, hydraulic specialists, sedimentologists, divers, engineers, geophysicists, marine surveyors, pyrotechnicians and archaeologists—now about 160 people—have been mapping the sunken armaments as they worked to clear safe patches of seafloor for wind-farm, cable and pipeline projects. But until this year, SeaTerra never possessed the remit it has long coveted: to begin systematically ameliorating the seafloor for the sake of marine ecosystems—and the people dependent on them. The German government has set aside 100 million euros (over $110 million) to remove the toxic mess from Lübeck Bay, off the Baltic port city of Lübeck, southeast of Kiel, as a pilot project. “No other country in the world has ever attempted or achieved this,” says Tobias Goldschmidt, the region’s environment minister, in a press release. Experts prepare the Norppa 300 for a trial run in the Baltic Sea in May. Andreas Muenchbach Guldin and other advocates are elated that the project is on, but they acknowledge it will only dent the Baltic’s total quantity of submerged ordnance. Their goal is to recover between 55 and 88 tons worth of munitions, though the pilot’s primary purpose is for SeaTerra and the two other firms to test their technology and to demonstrate to bankrollers that the job is doable. “Then it’s about scaling up and getting faster,” says Guldin. Faster is vital, because in their watery graves, the many land and naval mines, U-boat torpedoes, depth charges, artillery shells, chemical weapons, aerial bombs, and incendiary devices have corroded over almost 80 years. The Germans, like other dumping nations, long assumed that when the casings broke down, the vast ocean would simply dissolve pollutants into harmless fractions. About 25 years ago, scientists discovered that instead, the explosives remain live and are now oozing into the ecosystem and up the food chain. That flounder darting in front of the crawler’s camera from the Alkor’s dry lab? It almost certainly contains traces of TNT, the highly toxic compound used in explosives. Toxicologist Jennifer Strehse, from the Kiel-based Institute of Toxicology and Pharmacology for Natural Scientists, which identified the mounting toxic pollution, says that contamination is particularly widespread in shellfish, bottom-dwelling flatfish and other fauna that are close to the munition dumps. They’re “contaminated with carcinogens from TNT or arsenic or heavy metals like lead and mercury,” she says. An image of Lübeck bay’s seafloor shows a smattering of bombs. Geomar Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Scientists have also found toxic concentrations of TNT in Atlantic purple sea urchins, mysid crustaceans and blue mussels. Once contaminants have escaped into the water, they can’t be recovered, Strehse points out. “So, we’re working against time.” German health experts recommend that consumers limit themselves to no more than two meals of local fish a week to reduce exposure to heavy metals, dioxins or PCBs. The source of most of these contaminants are industrial processes and the burning of fossil fuels; TNT does not figure into the guidelines. Nevertheless, the risk of TNT and other contaminants from weapons is enough to cause Strehse, herself, to steer clear of all Baltic Sea mussels. The risk of immediate loss of life is also ever-present. Most of the submerged weapons remain as powerful as the day they were dumped. Now rusted through, they are even more unstable—presenting a precarious obstacle to fishing boats trawling the seafloor as well as offshore wind-farm developers, whose sprawling turbine parks are integral to Europe’s transition to clean energy systems. In the two German seas, over 400 people—tourists, sailors, fishers, naval cadets and munitions experts—have lost their lives to explosions from sunken weapons. German aerial bombs retrieved from the Baltic Sea are stacked and secured before the SeaTerra team transports them ashore for disposal. Germany currently has only one major disposal facility for unexploded ordnance. SeaTerra The menace doesn’t stay at sea, either. As the munitions deteriorate, amber-colored chunks of phosphorous from incendiary bombs, fragments of TNT or rusted casings often wash up on shore. Beachcombers who touch solid white phosphorus—usually mistaking it for Baltic amber, a sought-after gemstone—can suffer third-degree burns or worse. The chemical element sticks to human skin and can combust spontaneously when exposed to air at temperatures above 86 degrees Fahrenheit. Over half a century after the fighting ended, the task of addressing the environmental danger and risk to life from dumped munitions has become its own battle. When Guldin entered the field of munitions cleanup in 2000, he saw the problem’s vastness and malevolent power as the ultimate challenge for his technical imagination. Fifty-seven-year-old Guldin describes himself as a pacifist by nature and archaeologist by training. He grew up far removed from oceans, in southern Germany’s Black Forest where, as a conscientious objector, he refused to serve in the German Army, later joining the Green Party instead. He helped excavate Roman settlements along the Rhine River. Then he moved on to the Middle East, where he unearthed ancient civilizations in Yemen and Lebanon. Eventually, in 2000, he admitted to himself that the long stays abroad and one-off digs weren’t conducive to the family life he wanted. Shortly after this, he touched base with an old friend, Edgar Schwab. Dieter Guldin of SeaTerra has been encouraging the German government to clean up sunken war munitions for years. Drones Magazin Schwab, a geophysicist, was in Hamburg, Germany, and one step ahead of his buddy—starting up a little company to appropriate the lethal relics of the Third Reich from the ocean floor. The two friends were less interested in digging to explain humanity’s past than in undoing the damage it had inflicted upon nature, and together they co-founded SeaTerra. Guldin immersed himself in the history of munitions dumping in Northern Europe—a practice that was discontinued worldwide only in 1975. While SeaTerra conscientiously cleared patches of seafloor for industry, the mass of munitions across the greater seafloor gnawed at him. He insisted that his country clean it up so that future generations wouldn’t suffer this legacy of wars executed by generations past. He worked the halls of power for ten years but couldn’t get officialdom to touch the odious issue. The fact that the seafloor was littered with munitions has been common knowledge since 1945, but no one knew exactly how much there was or where. SeaTerra and a smorgasbord of concerned groups, including Strehse’s institute, understood that before anybody was going to address the issue, they first had to find out exactly what they were dealing with. In the course of its work for private companies, SeaTerra began developing technology—such as a prototype crawler, the DeepC—for surveying the seafloor, foot by excruciating foot. In the deep and churning North Sea, with its muscular tidal currents, much of the detritus lies yards beneath the seafloor. To penetrate the sediment, SeaTerra developed underwater drones and advanced multibeam radar equipment. For shallow tidal areas, SeaTerra also created low-flying drones outfitted with magnetic sensors that can detect metallic masses buried deep in the sand. SeaTerra technicians lower a device called a ScanFish. They use it to tow magnetic sensors through the water, about six feet above the seafloor. SeaTerra Many of SeaTerra’s innovations entailed modifying technology used in related fields, like mining, pyrotechnics and archaeology. The team started with a lot of energy but few resources: “In the beginning, we used zip ties and duct tape for everything,” Guldin says. The range of state-of-the-art technology the team now operates is not the brainchild of one person, but Guldin has been central to much of it. Now, with a firm grasp of the problem and how to address it, Guldin and others at SeaTerra are itching to display their accumulated know-how in Lübeck Bay. “The time has now come,” he announced recently on LinkedIn. “We, the explosive ordnance disposal companies, can now start our real work to make the oceans cleaner … and to measure our ideas and concepts against the physical reality of this blight.” It is, his announcement says, a great success for the company and a “recognition of our many years of effort in developing new technologies and concepts for explosive ordnance at sea.” Aboard the Alkor, the scientists believe their star, the Norppa 300, is ready for official deployment in Lübeck Bay. The crawler is the culmination of years of invention, testing and tweaking. Unlike previous undersea robots, it operates at depths up to almost 1,000 feet and can do so 24/7, even in turbulent waters. Its many functions will relieve professional divers of some of the cleanup expedition’s most perilous tasks. The robot is equipped with sonar and acoustic imaging for detecting and identifying buried munitions. Its detachable arms include a custom-designed vacuum that gingerly sucks up sediment from buried explosives and a pincer for lifting pieces of ammunition. The cleanup process for weapons that can be handled will involve three general steps using specialized ships. First, SeaTerra’s engineers and scientists on the Alkor—the survey vessel—will scan the site and classify the munitions. They will also take water samples for the Geomar Helmholtz Center to analyze on board, distinguishing conventional from chemical weaponry. Chemical weapons, which contain phosgene, arsenic and sulfur mustard (also known as mustard gas), are too lethal to handle, probably ever, admits Guldin. “You can’t see these gases or smell them,” he says, “and their detonation could blow a ship out of the water, killing a ship’s entire crew in a matter of minutes.” Those weapons will be left untouched. Aaron Beck of Geomar Helmholtz Center for Ocean Research stands beside a mass spectrometer, used to analyze the chemical contents of water samples, in the Alkor’s dry lab. Andreas Muenchbach Künitzer of the environment agency adds that the Nazis’ nerve gases were designed to incapacitate the eyes, skin and lungs of battlefield foes. “Decades underwater doesn’t dilute their potency,” she says. If the experts determine the material is safe enough for transportation, they’ll deploy the Norppa 300 to collect and deposit smaller items, like grenades, into undersea wire-mesh baskets. But if the explosive specialists monitoring from the ship above determine that the weaponry still contains detonators, divers—not a robot—will be sent to detach them. This is hazardous business that, thus far, only humans can execute. Next, a different team on a second ship—the clearance vessel—equipped with spud legs (stakes that hold the ship in place) will use a hydraulic crane equipped with cameras to extract larger munitions, including those with corrupted casings, and drop them into undersea receptacles. The final step is for a third team to haul the cargo onto the deck of their ship—the sorting vessel—to sort, label and package the lethal concoctions in steel tubes, and then transport them to an interim site in the Baltic Sea. There the material will be re-sunk in the tubes and stored underwater until it can be handed over to the responsible state authority, the Explosive Ordnance Disposal Service, for demolition. Some of the munitions SeaTerra clears from Germany’s seas date back to World War I, such as the six-inch-long cast iron shell shown here. SeaTerra The workers will have two months to clear the bay—and demonstrate whether the Norppa 300 and other technologies are either up to it or not. But there’s a hitch that will delay the destruction of all of the recovered weapons for about a year. Germany has a single major munitions disposal facility, and it is occupied with incinerating unexploded ordnance from around the globe, not least, incredibly, Nazi-era explosives still being unearthed from construction sites. That’s why the Lübeck Bay project’s budget includes construction of a disposal facility. The company and concept have yet to be finalized. One option is to build a floating clearance platform where robots would dissect ordnance and burn the chemical contents in a detonation chamber at temperatures of over 2300 degrees Fahrenheit, similar to how weapons are disposed of at the land-based facility. And there’s another issue. Over the years, the mounds of weaponry in the undersea dumping grounds have corroded and collapsed into one another, creating a gnarled, combustible mass of metals and explosive agents that make their recovery more complicated. The only options are to leave these or blow them up on-site. The best-case scenario is that all the Baltic’s most hazardous conventional munitions will finally be history by 2050, and work on the North Sea will be well underway. The worst case is that funding does not materialize and the mountains of explosives will continue to deteriorate en masse, emitting poisons. Before the green light came to start the cleanup, Guldin was becoming doubtful his country would ever address the mess, and he thought he might have to accept that SeaTerra’s expertise would never be put to the greater task that he and Schwab had envisioned. For the foreseeable future at least, he’ll be in the thick of culminating his life’s work, undoing some of humanity’s sins on the seafloor. This article is from Hakai Magazine, an online publication about science and society in coastal ecosystems. Read more stories like this at hakaimagazine.com. Related stories from Hakai Magazine: • Weapons of War Litter the Ocean Floor • Why Ocean Shores Beachcombing Is a Blast Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.

The ocean became a dumping ground for weapons after Allied forces defeated the Nazis. Now a team of robots and divers is making the waters safer

header-uncropped-robots-and-war-munitions.jpg
Germany’s North and Baltic Seas are littered with munitions from the First and Second World Wars, such as shells—as shown here—once fired from German battleships. SeaTerra

Aboard the Alkor, a 180-foot oceanographic vessel anchored in the Baltic Sea a few miles from the German port city of Kiel, engineer Henrik Schönheit grips a joystick-like lever in his fist. He nudges the lever up, and a one-of-a-kind robotic sea crawler about the size of a two-seat golf cart responds, creeping forward along the seafloor on rubber caterpillar tracks 40 feet below the ship. As the crawler inspects Kiel Bay’s sandy terrain, a live video stream beams up to a computer screen in a cramped room aboard the ship. The picture is so crystalline that it’s possible to count the tentacles of a translucent jellyfish floating past the camera. A scrum of scientists and technicians ooh and aah as they huddle around the screen, peering over Schönheit’s shoulder.

The bright-yellow robot is the Norppa 300, the newest fabrication of the explosive ordnance disposal company SeaTerra, which operates out of northern Germany. SeaTerra’s co-founder Dieter Guldin rates as one of Europe’s canniest experts on salvaging sunken explosives. Now, after years of experience clearing the seafloor of hazards for commercial operations, and campaigning the German government for large-scale remediation, SeaTerra is one of three companies participating in the first-ever mission to systematically clear munitions off a seafloor in the name of environmental protection. The arduous and exacting process of removing and destroying more than 1.6 million tons of volatile munitions from the Baltic and North Sea basins—an area roughly the size of West Virginia—is more urgent by the day: The weapons, which have killed hundreds of people who have come into accidental contact with them in the past, are now corroded. Their casings are breaking apart and releasing carcinogens into the seas.

A Massive Effort Is Underway to Rid the Baltic Sea of Sunken Bombs
Onboard the Alkor, during a test run this May, SeaTerra technicians Klaus-Dieter Golla, left, and Henrik Schönheit discuss video footage of the seafloor transmitted by the company’s Norppa 300 robot. Andreas Muenchbach

SeaTerra’s top technicians aboard the Alkor are testing the Norppa 300’s basic functions in the wild prior to the project’s start this month, in early September 2024: ensuring that its steering, sonar imaging of the seafloor, chemical sampler and video feed are fine-tuned. Everyone huddled in the ship’s dry lab watches rapt as the crawler bumps up against a vaguely rectangular object the size of a bar fridge. It’s largely obscured by seaweed and, from the looks of it, home to a lone Baltic flounder that’s swimming around the base. Aaron Beck, senior scientist at the Geomar Helmholtz Center for Ocean Research, a German marine research institute working alongside SeaTerra, identifies it as an ammunition crate. “Look, the flatness there, the corner. That’s not of the natural world,” he exclaims.


Dumped munitions lie in waters around the world but are ubiquitous in German waters. In the aftermath of World War II, all the conflict parties, including the United Kingdom, Russia, Japan and the United States, had to divest themselves of armaments. “They didn’t want [them] on land, and facilities to destroy [them] were too few,” explains Anita Künitzer of the German Environment Agency. Dumping at sea, a practice held over from World War I, was the obvious choice.

In occupied Germany, British forces established underwater disposal zones—one of which lies near Kiel Bay. “But,” says Guldin, “on their way to the designated dumping grounds, they also just threw hardware overboard.” Grainy black-and-white film footage shows British sailors busily operating multiple conveyor belts to cast crate after crate of leftovers into the sea. Whole ships and submarines packed with live munitions were scuttled in the rush to disarm the Germans.

1500 Miles Of Bombs Along Our Roads Aka Ammunition Dumps Or Arms Dump (1946)

Experts estimate that a ginormous 1.8 million tons of conventional munitions and another 5,500 tons of chemical weapons lie decomposing off Germany alone in the North and Baltic Seas, most from World War II. (Because of its busy ports, the North Sea received four times as much as the Baltic.) If all that weaponry were lined up, it would stretch from Paris to Moscow, about 1,500 miles! “Nowhere in German waters is there a square kilometer of seabed without munitions,” says Guldin.

In the postwar decades, freelancing scrap metal collectors hauled explosives and other valuable wartime debris ashore to hawk on the metals market. Fisher boats that ensnared unexploded munitions in their nets were required to turn them in to coastal authorities, not toss them overboard again. The German Navy’s anti-mine units attempted to clear some of the mess, usually through initiating underwater explosions, but lacked the proper equipment to tackle the problem systematically. Only when the private sector picked up operations did a whole new suite of technology and skill sets emerge.

Since the late 2000s, SeaTerra’s ensemble of marine biologists, hydraulic specialists, sedimentologists, divers, engineers, geophysicists, marine surveyors, pyrotechnicians and archaeologists—now about 160 people—have been mapping the sunken armaments as they worked to clear safe patches of seafloor for wind-farm, cable and pipeline projects.

But until this year, SeaTerra never possessed the remit it has long coveted: to begin systematically ameliorating the seafloor for the sake of marine ecosystems—and the people dependent on them. The German government has set aside 100 million euros (over $110 million) to remove the toxic mess from Lübeck Bay, off the Baltic port city of Lübeck, southeast of Kiel, as a pilot project. “No other country in the world has ever attempted or achieved this,” says Tobias Goldschmidt, the region’s environment minister, in a press release.

A Massive Effort Is Underway to Rid the Baltic Sea of Sunken Bombs
Experts prepare the Norppa 300 for a trial run in the Baltic Sea in May. Andreas Muenchbach

Guldin and other advocates are elated that the project is on, but they acknowledge it will only dent the Baltic’s total quantity of submerged ordnance. Their goal is to recover between 55 and 88 tons worth of munitions, though the pilot’s primary purpose is for SeaTerra and the two other firms to test their technology and to demonstrate to bankrollers that the job is doable. “Then it’s about scaling up and getting faster,” says Guldin.


Faster is vital, because in their watery graves, the many land and naval mines, U-boat torpedoes, depth charges, artillery shells, chemical weapons, aerial bombs, and incendiary devices have corroded over almost 80 years. The Germans, like other dumping nations, long assumed that when the casings broke down, the vast ocean would simply dissolve pollutants into harmless fractions. About 25 years ago, scientists discovered that instead, the explosives remain live and are now oozing into the ecosystem and up the food chain.

That flounder darting in front of the crawler’s camera from the Alkor’s dry lab? It almost certainly contains traces of TNT, the highly toxic compound used in explosives. Toxicologist Jennifer Strehse, from the Kiel-based Institute of Toxicology and Pharmacology for Natural Scientists, which identified the mounting toxic pollution, says that contamination is particularly widespread in shellfish, bottom-dwelling flatfish and other fauna that are close to the munition dumps. They’re “contaminated with carcinogens from TNT or arsenic or heavy metals like lead and mercury,” she says.

A Massive Effort Is Underway to Rid the Baltic Sea of Sunken Bombs
An image of Lübeck bay’s seafloor shows a smattering of bombs. Geomar Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research

Scientists have also found toxic concentrations of TNT in Atlantic purple sea urchins, mysid crustaceans and blue mussels. Once contaminants have escaped into the water, they can’t be recovered, Strehse points out. “So, we’re working against time.”

German health experts recommend that consumers limit themselves to no more than two meals of local fish a week to reduce exposure to heavy metals, dioxins or PCBs. The source of most of these contaminants are industrial processes and the burning of fossil fuels; TNT does not figure into the guidelines. Nevertheless, the risk of TNT and other contaminants from weapons is enough to cause Strehse, herself, to steer clear of all Baltic Sea mussels.

The risk of immediate loss of life is also ever-present. Most of the submerged weapons remain as powerful as the day they were dumped. Now rusted through, they are even more unstable—presenting a precarious obstacle to fishing boats trawling the seafloor as well as offshore wind-farm developers, whose sprawling turbine parks are integral to Europe’s transition to clean energy systems. In the two German seas, over 400 people—tourists, sailors, fishers, naval cadets and munitions experts—have lost their lives to explosions from sunken weapons.

A Massive Effort Is Underway to Rid the Baltic Sea of Sunken Bombs
German aerial bombs retrieved from the Baltic Sea are stacked and secured before the SeaTerra team transports them ashore for disposal. Germany currently has only one major disposal facility for unexploded ordnance. SeaTerra

The menace doesn’t stay at sea, either. As the munitions deteriorate, amber-colored chunks of phosphorous from incendiary bombs, fragments of TNT or rusted casings often wash up on shore. Beachcombers who touch solid white phosphorus—usually mistaking it for Baltic amber, a sought-after gemstone—can suffer third-degree burns or worse. The chemical element sticks to human skin and can combust spontaneously when exposed to air at temperatures above 86 degrees Fahrenheit.

Over half a century after the fighting ended, the task of addressing the environmental danger and risk to life from dumped munitions has become its own battle. When Guldin entered the field of munitions cleanup in 2000, he saw the problem’s vastness and malevolent power as the ultimate challenge for his technical imagination.


Fifty-seven-year-old Guldin describes himself as a pacifist by nature and archaeologist by training. He grew up far removed from oceans, in southern Germany’s Black Forest where, as a conscientious objector, he refused to serve in the German Army, later joining the Green Party instead. He helped excavate Roman settlements along the Rhine River. Then he moved on to the Middle East, where he unearthed ancient civilizations in Yemen and Lebanon. Eventually, in 2000, he admitted to himself that the long stays abroad and one-off digs weren’t conducive to the family life he wanted. Shortly after this, he touched base with an old friend, Edgar Schwab.

A Massive Effort Is Underway to Rid the Baltic Sea of Sunken Bombs
Dieter Guldin of SeaTerra has been encouraging the German government to clean up sunken war munitions for years. Drones Magazin

Schwab, a geophysicist, was in Hamburg, Germany, and one step ahead of his buddy—starting up a little company to appropriate the lethal relics of the Third Reich from the ocean floor. The two friends were less interested in digging to explain humanity’s past than in undoing the damage it had inflicted upon nature, and together they co-founded SeaTerra.

Guldin immersed himself in the history of munitions dumping in Northern Europe—a practice that was discontinued worldwide only in 1975. While SeaTerra conscientiously cleared patches of seafloor for industry, the mass of munitions across the greater seafloor gnawed at him. He insisted that his country clean it up so that future generations wouldn’t suffer this legacy of wars executed by generations past. He worked the halls of power for ten years but couldn’t get officialdom to touch the odious issue.

The fact that the seafloor was littered with munitions has been common knowledge since 1945, but no one knew exactly how much there was or where. SeaTerra and a smorgasbord of concerned groups, including Strehse’s institute, understood that before anybody was going to address the issue, they first had to find out exactly what they were dealing with.

In the course of its work for private companies, SeaTerra began developing technology—such as a prototype crawler, the DeepC—for surveying the seafloor, foot by excruciating foot. In the deep and churning North Sea, with its muscular tidal currents, much of the detritus lies yards beneath the seafloor. To penetrate the sediment, SeaTerra developed underwater drones and advanced multibeam radar equipment. For shallow tidal areas, SeaTerra also created low-flying drones outfitted with magnetic sensors that can detect metallic masses buried deep in the sand.

A Massive Effort Is Underway to Rid the Baltic Sea of Sunken Bombs
SeaTerra technicians lower a device called a ScanFish. They use it to tow magnetic sensors through the water, about six feet above the seafloor. SeaTerra

Many of SeaTerra’s innovations entailed modifying technology used in related fields, like mining, pyrotechnics and archaeology. The team started with a lot of energy but few resources: “In the beginning, we used zip ties and duct tape for everything,” Guldin says. The range of state-of-the-art technology the team now operates is not the brainchild of one person, but Guldin has been central to much of it.

Now, with a firm grasp of the problem and how to address it, Guldin and others at SeaTerra are itching to display their accumulated know-how in Lübeck Bay. “The time has now come,” he announced recently on LinkedIn. “We, the explosive ordnance disposal companies, can now start our real work to make the oceans cleaner … and to measure our ideas and concepts against the physical reality of this blight.” It is, his announcement says, a great success for the company and a “recognition of our many years of effort in developing new technologies and concepts for explosive ordnance at sea.”


Aboard the Alkor, the scientists believe their star, the Norppa 300, is ready for official deployment in Lübeck Bay. The crawler is the culmination of years of invention, testing and tweaking. Unlike previous undersea robots, it operates at depths up to almost 1,000 feet and can do so 24/7, even in turbulent waters. Its many functions will relieve professional divers of some of the cleanup expedition’s most perilous tasks. The robot is equipped with sonar and acoustic imaging for detecting and identifying buried munitions. Its detachable arms include a custom-designed vacuum that gingerly sucks up sediment from buried explosives and a pincer for lifting pieces of ammunition.

The cleanup process for weapons that can be handled will involve three general steps using specialized ships. First, SeaTerra’s engineers and scientists on the Alkor—the survey vesselwill scan the site and classify the munitions. They will also take water samples for the Geomar Helmholtz Center to analyze on board, distinguishing conventional from chemical weaponry. Chemical weapons, which contain phosgene, arsenic and sulfur mustard (also known as mustard gas), are too lethal to handle, probably ever, admits Guldin. “You can’t see these gases or smell them,” he says, “and their detonation could blow a ship out of the water, killing a ship’s entire crew in a matter of minutes.” Those weapons will be left untouched.

A Massive Effort Is Underway to Rid the Baltic Sea of Sunken Bombs
Aaron Beck of Geomar Helmholtz Center for Ocean Research stands beside a mass spectrometer, used to analyze the chemical contents of water samples, in the Alkor’s dry lab. Andreas Muenchbach

Künitzer of the environment agency adds that the Nazis’ nerve gases were designed to incapacitate the eyes, skin and lungs of battlefield foes. “Decades underwater doesn’t dilute their potency,” she says.

If the experts determine the material is safe enough for transportation, they’ll deploy the Norppa 300 to collect and deposit smaller items, like grenades, into undersea wire-mesh baskets. But if the explosive specialists monitoring from the ship above determine that the weaponry still contains detonators, divers—not a robot—will be sent to detach them. This is hazardous business that, thus far, only humans can execute.

Next, a different team on a second ship—the clearance vessel—equipped with spud legs (stakes that hold the ship in place) will use a hydraulic crane equipped with cameras to extract larger munitions, including those with corrupted casings, and drop them into undersea receptacles. The final step is for a third team to haul the cargo onto the deck of their ship—the sorting vessel—to sort, label and package the lethal concoctions in steel tubes, and then transport them to an interim site in the Baltic Sea. There the material will be re-sunk in the tubes and stored underwater until it can be handed over to the responsible state authority, the Explosive Ordnance Disposal Service, for demolition.

A Massive Effort Is Underway to Rid the Baltic Sea of Sunken Bombs
Some of the munitions SeaTerra clears from Germany’s seas date back to World War I, such as the six-inch-long cast iron shell shown here. SeaTerra

The workers will have two months to clear the bay—and demonstrate whether the Norppa 300 and other technologies are either up to it or not.

But there’s a hitch that will delay the destruction of all of the recovered weapons for about a year. Germany has a single major munitions disposal facility, and it is occupied with incinerating unexploded ordnance from around the globe, not least, incredibly, Nazi-era explosives still being unearthed from construction sites. That’s why the Lübeck Bay project’s budget includes construction of a disposal facility. The company and concept have yet to be finalized. One option is to build a floating clearance platform where robots would dissect ordnance and burn the chemical contents in a detonation chamber at temperatures of over 2300 degrees Fahrenheit, similar to how weapons are disposed of at the land-based facility.

And there’s another issue. Over the years, the mounds of weaponry in the undersea dumping grounds have corroded and collapsed into one another, creating a gnarled, combustible mass of metals and explosive agents that make their recovery more complicated. The only options are to leave these or blow them up on-site. The best-case scenario is that all the Baltic’s most hazardous conventional munitions will finally be history by 2050, and work on the North Sea will be well underway. The worst case is that funding does not materialize and the mountains of explosives will continue to deteriorate en masse, emitting poisons.

Before the green light came to start the cleanup, Guldin was becoming doubtful his country would ever address the mess, and he thought he might have to accept that SeaTerra’s expertise would never be put to the greater task that he and Schwab had envisioned. For the foreseeable future at least, he’ll be in the thick of culminating his life’s work, undoing some of humanity’s sins on the seafloor.

This article is from Hakai Magazine, an online publication about science and society in coastal ecosystems. Read more stories like this at hakaimagazine.com.

Related stories from Hakai Magazine:

Weapons of War Litter the Ocean Floor

Why Ocean Shores Beachcombing Is a Blast

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A rare glimpse inside the mountain tunnel that carries water to Southern California

In the 1930s, workers bored a 13-mile tunnel beneath Mt. San Jacinto. Here's a look inside the engineering feat that carries Colorado River water to Southern California.

Thousands of feet below the snowy summit of Mt. San Jacinto, a formidable feat of engineering and grit makes life as we know it in Southern California possible. The 13-mile-long San Jacinto Tunnel was bored through the mountain in the 1930s by a crew of about 1,200 men who worked day and night for six years, blasting rock and digging with machinery. Completed in 1939, the tunnel was a cornerstone in the construction of the 242-mile Colorado River Aqueduct. It enabled the delivery of as much as 1 billion gallons of water per day.The tunnel is usually off-limits when it is filled and coursing with a massive stream of Colorado River water. But recently, while it was shut down for annual maintenance, the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California opened the west end of the passage to give The Times and others a rare look inside. “It’s an engineering marvel,” said John Bednarski, an assistant general manager of MWD. “It’s pretty awe-inspiring.” The 16-foot-diameter San Jacinto Tunnel runs 13 miles through the mountain. While shut down for maintenance, the tunnel has a constant stream of water entering from the mountain. A group visits the west end of the San Jacinto Tunnel, where the mouth of the water tunnel enters a chamber. He wore a hard hat as he led a group to the gaping, horseshoe-shaped mouth of the tunnel. The passage’s concrete arch faded in the distance to pitch black.The tunnel wasn’t entirely empty. The sound of rushing water echoed from the walls as an ankle-deep stream flowed from the portal and cascaded into a churning pool beneath metal gates. Many in the tour group wore rubber boots as they stood on moist concrete in a chamber faintly lit by filtered sunlight, peering into the dark tunnel. This constant flow comes as groundwater seeps and gushes from springs that run through the heart of the mountain. In places deep in the tunnel, water shoots so forcefully from the floor or the wall that workers have affectionately named these soaking obstacles “the fire hose” and “the car wash.”Standing by the flowing stream, Bednarski called it “leakage water from the mountain itself.”Mt. San Jacinto rises 10,834 feet above sea level, making it the second-highest peak in Southern California after 11,503-foot Mt. San Gorgonio.As the tunnel passes beneath San Jacinto’s flank, as much as 2,500 feet of solid rock lies overhead, pierced only by two vertical ventilation shafts. Snow covers Mt. San Jacinto, as seen from Whitewater, in March. At the base of the mountain, the 13-mile San Jacinto Tunnel starts its journey. The tunnel transports Colorado River water to Southern California’s cities. During maintenance, workers roll through on a tractor equipped with a frame bearing metal bristles that scrape the tunnel walls, cleaning off algae and any growth of invasive mussels. Workers also inspect the tunnel by passing through on an open trailer, scanning for any cracks that require repairs.“It’s like a Disneyland ride,” said Bryan Raymond, an MWD conveyance team manager. “You’re sitting on this trailer, and there’s a bunch of other people on it too, and you’re just cruising through looking at the walls.” Aside from the spraying and trickling water, employee Michael Volpone said he has also heard faint creaking.“If you sit still and listen, you can kind of hear the earth move,” he said. “It’s a little eerie.”Standing at the mouth of the tunnel, the constant babble of cascading water dominates the senses. The air is moist but not musty. Put a hand to the clear flowing water, and it feels warm enough for a swim. On the concrete walls are stained lines that extend into the darkness, marking where the water often reaches when the aqueduct is running full. Many who have worked on the aqueduct say they are impressed by the system’s design and how engineers and workers built such a monumental system with the basic tools and technology available during the Great Depression.Pipelines and tunnelsThe search for a route to bring Colorado River water across the desert to Los Angeles began with the signing of a 1922 agreement that divided water among seven states. After the passage of a $2-million bond measure by Los Angeles voters in 1925, hundreds of surveyors fanned out across the largely roadless Mojave and Sonoran deserts to take measurements and study potential routes.The surveyors traveled mostly on horseback and on foot as they mapped the rugged terrain, enduring grueling days in desert camps where the heat sometimes topped 120 degrees.Planners studied and debated more than 100 potential paths before settling on one in 1931. The route began near Parker, Ariz., and took a curving path through desert valleys, around obstacles and, where there was no better option, through mountains.In one official report, a manager wrote that “to bore straight through the mountains is very expensive and to pump over them is likewise costly.” He said the planners carefully weighed these factors as they decided on a solution that would deliver water at the lowest cost. VIDEO | 02:45 A visit to the giant tunnel that brings Colorado River water to Southern California Share via Those in charge of the Metropolitan Water District, which had been created in 1928 to lead the effort, were focused on delivering water to 13 participating cities, including Los Angeles, Burbank and Anaheim. William Mulholland, Los Angeles’ chief water engineer, had led an early scouting party to map possible routes from the Colorado River to Southern California’s cities in 1923, a decade after he celebrated the completion of the 233-mile aqueduct from the Owens Valley to Los Angeles with the triumphant words, “There it is. Take it.”The aqueduct’s design matched the audaciousness of the giant dams the federal government was starting to build along the Colorado — Hoover Dam (originally called Boulder Dam) and Parker Dam, which formed the reservoir where the aqueduct would begin its journey.Five pumping plants would be built to lift water more than 1,600 feet along the route across the desert. Between those points, water would run by gravity through open canals, buried pipelines and 29 separate tunnels stretching 92 miles — the longest of which was a series of nine tunnels running 33.7 miles through hills bordering the Coachella Valley.To make it possible, voters in the district’s 13 cities overwhelmingly approved a $220-million bond in 1931, the equivalent of a $4.5-billion investment today, which enabled the hiring of 35,000 workers. Crews set up camps, excavated canals and began to blast open shafts through the desert’s rocky spines to make way for water.In 1933, workers started tearing into the San Jacinto Mountains at several locations, from the east and the west, as well as excavating shafts from above. Black-and-white photographs and films showed miners in hard hats and soiled uniforms as they stood smoking cigarettes, climbing into open rail cars and running machinery that scooped and loaded piles of rocks.Crews on another hulking piece of equipment, called a jumbo, used compressed-air drills to bore dozens of holes, which were packed with blasting power and detonated to pierce the rock. (Courtesy of Metropolitan Water District of Southern California) The work progressed slowly, growing complicated when the miners struck underground streams, which sent water gushing in.According to a 1991 history of the MWD titled “A Water Odyssey,” one flood in 1934 disabled two of three pumps that had been brought in to clear the tunnel. In another sudden flood, an engineer recalled that “the water came in with a big, mad rush and filled the shaft to the top. Miners scrambled up the 800-foot ladder to the surface, and the last man out made it with water swirling around his waist.”Death and delaysAccording to the MWD’s records, 13 workers died during the tunnel’s construction, including men who were struck by falling rocks, run over by equipment or electrocuted with a wire on one of the mining trolleys that rolled on railroad tracks. The Metropolitan Water District had originally hired Wenzel & Henoch Construction Co. to build the tunnel. But after less than two years, only about two miles of the tunnel had been excavated, and the contractor was fired by MWD general manager Frank Elwin “F.E.” Weymouth, who assigned the district’s engineers and workers to complete the project.Construction was delayed again in 1937 when workers went on strike for six weeks. But in 1939, the last wall of rock tumbled down, uniting the east and west tunnels, and the tunnel was finished. John Bednarski, assistant general manager of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, stands in a water tunnel near the end point of the larger San Jacinto Tunnel, which carries Colorado River water. The total cost was $23.5 million. But there also were other costs. As the construction work drained water, many nearby springs used by the Native Soboba people stopped flowing. The drying of springs and creeks left the tribe’s members without water and starved their farms, which led to decades of litigation by the Soboba Band of Luiseño Indians and eventually a legal settlement in 2008 that resolved the tribe’s water rights claims.The ‘magic touch’ of waterBy the time the tunnel was completed, the Metropolitan Water District had released a 20-minute film that was shown in movie theaters and schools celebrating its conquest of the Colorado River and the desert. It called Mt. San Jacinto the “tallest and most forbidding barrier.”In a rich baritone, the narrator declared Southern California “a new empire made possible by the magic touch of water.” “Water required to support this growth and wealth could not be obtained from the local rainfall in this land of sunshine,” the narrator said as the camera showed newly built homes and streets filled with cars and buses. “The people therefore realized that a new and dependable water supply must be provided, and this new water supply has been found on the lofty western slopes of the Rocky Mountains, a wonderland of beauty, clad by nature in a white mantle of snow.”Water began to flow through the aqueduct in 1939 as the pumping plants were tested. At the Julian Hinds Pumping Plant, near the aqueduct’s halfway point, water was lifted 441 feet, surging through three pipelines up a desert mountain. March 2012 image of the 10-foot-diameter delivery lines carrying water 441 feet uphill from the Julian Hinds Pumping Plant. (Los Angeles Times) From there, the water flowed by gravity, moving at 3-6 mph as it traveled through pipelines, siphons and tunnels. It entered the San Jacinto Tunnel in Cabazon, passed under the mountain and emerged near the city of San Jacinto, then continued in pipelines to Lake Mathews reservoir in Riverside County. In 1941, Colorado River water started flowing to Pasadena, Beverly Hills, Compton and other cities. Within six years, another pipeline was built to transport water from the aqueduct south to San Diego.The influx of water fueled Southern California’s rapid growth during and after World War II.Over decades, the dams and increased diversions also took an environmental toll, drying up much of the once-vast wetlands in Mexico’s Colorado River Delta. John Bednarski, assistant general manager of the Metropolitan Water District, walks in a water tunnel near the end point of the larger San Jacinto Tunnel. An impressive designToday, 19 million people depend on water delivered by the MWD, which also imports supplies from Northern California through the aqueducts and pipelines of the State Water Project.In recent decades, the agency has continued boring tunnels where needed to move water. A $1.2-billion, 44-mile-long conveyance system called the Inland Feeder, completed in 2009, involved boring eight miles of tunnels through the San Bernardino Mountains and another 7.9-mile tunnel under the Badlands in Riverside County.The system enabled the district to increase its capacity and store more water during wet years in Diamond Valley Lake, Southern California’s largest reservoir, which can hold about 260 billion gallons of water. “Sometimes tunneling is actually the most effective way to get from point A to point B,” said Deven Upadhyay, the MWD’s general manager.Speaking hypothetically, Upadhyay said, if engineers had another shot at designing and building the aqueduct now using modern technology, it’s hard to say if they would end up choosing the same route through Mt. San Jacinto or a different route around it. But the focus on minimizing cost might yield a similar route, he said.“Even to this day, it’s a pretty impressive design,” Upadhyay said.When people drive past on the I-10 in Cabazon, few realize that a key piece of infrastructure lies hidden where the desert meets the base of the mountain. At the tunnel’s exit point near San Jacinto, the only visible signs of the infrastructure are several concrete structures resembling bunkers. When the aqueduct is running, those who enter the facility will hear the rumble of rushing water. The tunnel’s west end was opened to a group of visitors in March, when the district’s managers held an event to name the tunnel in honor of Randy Record, who served on the MWD board for two decades and was chair from 2014 to 2018. Speaking to an audience, Upadhyay reflected on the struggles the region now faces as the Colorado River is sapped by drought and global warming, and he drew a parallel to the challenges the tunnel’s builders overcame in the 1930s. “They found a path,” Upadhyay said. “This incredible engineering feat. And it required strength, courage and really an innovative spirit.” “When we now think about the challenges that we face today, dealing with wild swings in climate and the potential reductions that we might face, sharing dwindling supplies on our river systems with the growing Southwest, it’s going to require the same thing — strength, courage and a spirit of innovation,” he said. A steep steel staircase gives access to a water tunnel near the end point of the larger San Jacinto Tunnel, which carries Colorado River water to Southern California.

Officials to Test Water From Ohio Village Near Cold War-Era Weapons Plant After Newspaper Probe

Authorities in Ohio plan to test the water supply across a small village near a former weapons plant after a newspaper investigation published Friday found high levels of radioactivity in samples taken at a school, athletic field, library and other sites

LUCKEY, Ohio (AP) — Authorities in Ohio plan to test the groundwater supply across a village near a former weapons plant after a newspaper investigation published Friday found high levels of radioactivity in samples taken at a school, athletic field, library and other sites.However, The Blade in Toledo said its tests showed radioactivity levels 10 times higher than normal in water from a drinking fountain at Eastwood Middle School, 45 times higher than normal at the Luckey Library and 1,731 times higher than normal at a water pump near athletic fields.“We’ve got to get to the bottom of this,” said Lt. Col. Robert Burnham, commander of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Buffalo District, which oversees the cleanup.Nineteen of the 39 samples collected by the newspaper from well water across Luckey — at homes, businesses, and public places — showed radioactivity at least 10 times greater than what the federal government calls normal for the area, the newspaper said. The Blade hired an accredited private lab to conduct the testing.The radioactivity detected was primarily bismuth-214, which decays from the radioactive gas radon-222. Experts agree that high levels of bismuth-214 suggest high levels of radon are also present.Radon exposure is the leading cause of lung cancer in nonsmokers.The testing also found low levels of radioactive cobalt-60, a man-made isotope, in two wells. Experts called that finding extremely rare.Taehyun Roh, a Texas A&M University scientist who specializes in environmental exposures, said regulators should also conduct air and soil testing to assess the extent of the contamination and identify the source."Since this area likely has high radon levels, testing for radon in both air and water is advisable,” he wrote in an email. “A safe drinking water advisory should be issued, recommending the use of bottled water until further assessments and mitigation measures are in place.”The Corps of Engineers has long maintained that residential drinking water was not being contaminated by the removal work. Burnham and others said they still believe that to be true, citing thousands of their own soil samples.The state Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Health will lead the testing. In an email, Ohio EPA spokesperson Katie Boyer told the newspaper the contaminant levels in the public drinking water are still “within acceptable drinking water standards.” She said any concerns raised by the state testing would be addressed.The 44-acre industrial site — 22 miles (35 kilometers) south of Toledo — was long crucial to America’s nuclear weapons program. In the 1940s, farmland was replaced by a sprawling defense plant that produced magnesium metal for the Manhattan Project. In the 1950s, the plant became the government’s sole source of beryllium metal for nuclear bombs, Cold War missiles and Space Race products, including a heat shield for Project Mercury.“Things that happened generations ago are still affecting us,” said Karina Hahn-Claydon, a 50-year-old teacher whose family lives less than a mile from the site. “And that’s because the government didn’t take care of it.”Private drinking wells, unlike municipal systems, are not regulated, and responsibility for testing is left to owners. The Blade’s testing took place from April 2024 through January.Radioactivity has been linked to an increased risk of various cancers, including blood and thyroid cancers.Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.Photos You Should See - Feb. 2025

UK spending watchdog censures water firms and regulators over sewage failings

NAO finds regulatory gaps have enabled overspending on infrastructure building while not improving sewage worksWater companies have been getting away with failures to improve sewage works and overspending because of regulatory problems, a damning report by the government’s spending watchdog has found.Firms have overspent on infrastructure building, the National Audit Office (NAO) found, with some of these costs being added to consumers’ bills. The Guardian this week reported Ofwat and the independent water commission are investigating water firms for spending up to 10 times as much on their sewage works and piping as comparable countries. Continue reading...

Water companies have been getting away with failures to improve sewage works and overspending because of regulatory problems, a damning report by the government’s spending watchdog has found.Firms have overspent on infrastructure building, the National Audit Office (NAO) found, with some of these costs being added to consumers’ bills. The Guardian this week reported Ofwat and the independent water commission are investigating water firms for spending up to 10 times as much on their sewage works and piping as comparable countries.Bills in England and Wales are rising by £123 on average this year, and will go up further over the next five years, so that companies can fix ageing sewage infrastructure and stop spills of human waste from contaminating rivers and seas. Several water firms have complained to the Competition and Markets Authority because they want the regulator to allow them to increase bills even further.Only 1% of water companies’ actions to improve environmental performance, such as improving sewer overflows, have been inspected by the Environment Agency, the authors of the NAO report said. They also found there was no regulator responsible for proactively inspecting wastewater assets to prevent further environmental harm.The report, which audited the three water regulators, Ofwat, the Environment Agency, and the Drinking Water Inspectorate, as well as the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs, also found the regulators did not have a good understanding of the condition of infrastructure assets such as leaking sewers and ageing sewage treatment facilities as they do not have a set of metrics to assess their condition.Gareth Davies, the head of the NAO, said: “Given the unprecedented situation facing the sector, Defra and the regulators need to act urgently to address industry performance and resilience to ensure the sector can meet government targets and achieve value for money over the long term for bill payers.”Despite the huge costs of infrastructure, the water companies have moved slowly meaning that at the current rate, it would take 700 years to replace the entire existing water network, the report found. Regulatory gaps and a lack of urgency about replacing old and malfunctioning infrastructure has caused a “rising tide of risk” in the sector, which is contributing to increasing bills for customers, the report warned.It also criticised the lack of a national plan for water supply and recommended that Defra must understand the costs and deliverability of its plans, alongside the impact they would have on customers’ bills.Several of the issues raised by the NAO, including concerns about weak infrastructure, have come to the fore in the debate over the future of Thames Water, the country’s largest water company with 16 million customers. Thames, which is under significant financial pressure with almost £20bn in debt, needs to secure fresh investment within months. Questions over the state of Thames’s infrastructure and regulatory punishment it could face for its failures have dogged the process of winning fresh funds. Meanwhile, Ofwat has also rejected its requests to raise bills by as much as 59%, instead allowing a 35% increase over the next five years.The government set up the independent water commission (IWC) last year to investigate how the water industry operated and whether regulation was fit for purpose.Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, the Tory chair of the Commons public accounts committee, said: “Today’s NAO report lays bare the scale of the challenges facing the water sector – not least the real prospect of water shortfall without urgent action.“The consequences of government’s failure to regulate this sector properly are now landing squarely on bill payers who are being left to pick up the tab. After years of under-investment, pollution incidents and water supply issues, it is no surprise that consumer trust is at an all-time low. Having not built any reservoirs in the last 30 years, we now need 10.skip past newsletter promotionSign up to Business TodayGet set for the working day – we'll point you to all the business news and analysis you need every morningPrivacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.after newsletter promotion“Consumers rightly expect a water sector that is robust, resilient and fit for the future. Defra and the regulators must focus on rebuilding public confidence and ensure the sector can attract the long-term investment it desperately needs.”An Environment Agency spokesperson said: “We recognise the significant challenges facing the water industry. That is why we will be working with Defra and other water regulators to implement the report’s recommendations and update our frameworks to reflect its findings.”An Ofwat spokesperson added: “We agree with the NAO’s recommendations for Ofwat and we continue to progress our work in these areas, and to contribute to the IWC wider review of the regulatory framework. We also look forward to the IWC’s recommendations and to working with government and other regulators to better deliver for customers and the environment.”A Defra spokesperson said: “The government has taken urgent action to fix the water industry – but change will not happen overnight. We have put water companies under tough special measures through our landmark Water Act.”Water UK, which represents the water companies, has been contacted for comment.

Water firms admit sewage monitoring damaging public trust

The industry says powers to self-monitor water quality should be handed back to the regulator.

Water companies should no longer be allowed to monitor their own levels of sewage pollution, the industry body has told the BBC exclusively.Instead they are proposing a new, third-party monitoring system to build consumer trust.The recommendation is part of a submission made to the UK government's independent review into the water sector.Campaigners have long complained the companies' self-reporting has prevented the true scale of pollution in UK water being revealed.A third-party system could add more pressure to the regulators, which have also been criticised for not holding the companies to account. A report from the National Audit Office is expected to say on Friday that the Environment Agency does not currently have enough capacity to take on any new monitoring.David Henderson, CEO of industry body Water UK, told the BBC: "We absolutely accept that self-monitoring is not helping to instil trust and so we would like to see an end to it, and in place of it a more robust, third-party system." As part of their permitting arrangements water companies are expected to regularly sample water quality to identify potential pollution, and submit this data to the Environment Agency in an arrangement known as "operator self monitoring". But there have been incidents of misreporting by water companies in England and Wales uncovered by the regulators, who said some cases had been deliberate.Southern Water was previously issued fines totalling £213m by the industry regulator (Ofwat) and the environmental regulator (the Environment Agency) for manipulating sewage data.In that case, there was unreported pollution into numerous conservation sites which caused "major environmental harm" to wildlife.The company later admitted its actions "fell short".Henderson added that the industry never asked to self-monitor, but that it was introduced in 2009 by the then Labour government to "reduce the administrative burden" on the Environment Agency (EA). In 2023, the BBC reported that EA staff were concerned that, due to funding cuts, the Agency was increasingly relying on water companies to self-report rather than carrying out its own checks on pollution from sewage. The current environment minister, Steve Reed, has promised to review the system, calling it the equivalent of companies "mark[ing] their own homework".But the National Audit Office (NAO), which reviews government spending, questioned the ability of the EA to take on any new monitoring. "Regulators need to address the fact that they currently have limited oversight over whether water companies are carrying out their work as expected. It is hard to see how they will achieve this without increased overall capacity," said Anita Shah, NAO Director of Regulation.It is expected to publish a full review of the regulation of the water sector on Friday. A Defra spokesperson told the BBC: "We are committed to taking decisive action to fix the water industry. The Water Commission's recommendations will mark the next major step [to] restore public trust in the sector."The government launched an independent water commission in October to review the sector and the way it is regulated. The public consultation closed on Wednesday with the findings expected in July. Water UK submitted a 200-page document of recommendations, including this call to end self-monitoring.The industry body also requested that water meters be universal across England and Wales to make bills fairer. At present about 60% of the population have a meter."The meter is just to ensure that people are paying for what they use as opposed to a flat rate of system where you can use virtually no water and pay the same as someone filling up a pool three times in a summer," said Henderson."This doesn't properly reflect the value of water and encourage people to conserve it in the way that we need," he added.

Cambodia Canal's Impact on Mekong Questioned After China Signs Deal

By Francesco Guarascio(Reuters) -Cambodia should share a feasibility study on the impact of a planned China-backed canal that would divert water...

(Reuters) -Cambodia should share a feasibility study on the impact of a planned China-backed canal that would divert water from the rice-growing floodplains of Vietnam's Mekong Delta, said the body overseeing the transnational river.After months of uncertainty, Phnom Penh last week signed a deal with China to develop the Funan Techo Canal when President Xi Jinping visited Cambodia as part of a tour of Southeast Asia.It was Beijing's first explicit public commitment to the project, giving state-controlled construction giant China Communications Construction Company (CCCC) a 49% stake through a subsidiary, but also linking Chinese support to the "sustainability" of the project.The Secretariat of the intergovernmental Mekong River Commission (MRC) that coordinates the sustainable development of Southeast Asia's longest river said it had so far received from Cambodia only "basic information" on the project."We hope that further details, including the feasibility study report and other relevant reports, will be provided," the Commission said in a statement to Reuters this week.That would be needed "to ensure that any potential implications for the broader Mekong Basin are fully considered," it added.The canal has already created concern among environmentalists who say it could further harm the delicate ecology of the Mekong Delta, which is Vietnam's major rice growing region and is already facing problems of drought and salination as result of infrastructure projects upstream. Vietnam is also a leading exporter of rice.On Friday, the Cambodian government said the canal would have minimal environmental impact and "aligns with the 1995 Mekong Agreement" which governs cooperation among riverine countries in Southeast Asia.The Mekong River, fed by a series of tributaries, flows some 4,900 kilometres (3,045 miles) from its source in the Tibetan plateau through China, Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam to the sea."Whether the Funan Techo Canal violates the 1995 Mekong Agreement depends on several factors, including its connection to the Mekong mainstream," the Commission said, offering additional guidance to Phnom Penh and other member states "to ensure compliance".Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam are members of the MRC while China and Myanmar are dialogue partners.The Cambodian government did not respond to questions about whether it intended to share the requested documents.Vietnam's foreign ministry did not reply to a request for comment after the deal with China was signed, but the country has repeatedly asked Cambodia to share more information about the canal to assess its impact.Xi made no reference to the canal in his public statements in Phnom Penh but a joint communique issued at the end of his visit said China supported Cambodia in building the canal "in accordance with the principles of feasibility and sustainability".The deal signed by CCCC on Friday was for a 151.6 km (94.2 miles) canal costing $1.16 billion.However, the Cambodian government says on the canal's official website that the waterway would stretch 180 km and cost $1.7 billion at completion in 2028.The higher cost reflects a short section to be built by Cambodian firms as well as bridges and water conservation resources, the government told Reuters without clarifying who would pay for the bridges and water conservation.Cambodia's deputy prime minister said in May 2024 that China would cover the entire cost of the project, which was put at $1.7 billion.The canal is designed to link the Mekong Basin to the Gulf of Thailand in Cambodia's southern Kep province. Much of the Mekong's nutrient-rich sediment no longer reaches rice farms in the Delta because of multiple hydroelectric dams built by China upriver, a Reuters analysis showed in 2022.The project agreed with China is also different from the original plan as it is focusing on boosting irrigation rather than solely pursuing navigation purposes, said Brian Eyler, an expert on the Mekong region at U.S.-based think tank Stimson Center.The water diverted from the Mekong Delta "will be much more than previously described," said Eyler.(Reporting by Francesco Guarascio; additional reporting by Khanh Vu in Hanoi; Editing by Kate Mayberry)Copyright 2025 Thomson Reuters.

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