Pond filled with 80,000 litres of water to help stop it from drying out

ALMOST 80,000 litres of water has been pumped into a village pond after its level had dropped by almost 5ft in depth since the start of the year.

Sonning Common Parish Council delivered the water last Friday after purchasing an abstraction licence for a month, which permits it to extract 20,000 litres of water per day.

The moved comes amid concerns that the pond is leaking and about the knock-on effect this is having on its wildlife, particularly on the carp that live there.

The fish are currently being monitored after two carp were found floating on the surface in the past two weeks.

The council met with the Environment Agency last week, which advised that chlorinated water, while not preferable to fresh water, would support the wildlife better than it trying to survive in the current situation.

Inspired Villages, which is currently constructing the first phase of its 133-home retirement village on land next to the pond, contributed £500 towards the £900 total cost of the licence.

Parish clerk Andrew Donachie and Councillor Stuart Howe were assisted by employees of the property developer to pump water into the pond from a washout hydrant in Widmore Lane. Mr Donachie said that the water level will be measured after the initial water delivery and monitored each day thereafter.

He said that each delivery will be spaced roughly one week apart, which will allow the chlorine to evaporate between deliveries and also reduce the manual labour required.

Both drought conditions and potential infrastructure issues have been investigated as potential causes for the sudden water loss.

Mr Donachie has said he believes the water loss has stabilised at its current level. However, the underlying cause is still being investigated.

At a meeting of the parish council on Monday last week, Sam Metcalf, who was part of a team who volunteered to clean up the pond, again urged the council to act swiftly to save the pond.

Mr Metcalf, who estimated the pond’s current level to be about 1.5ft deep, said: “The duck house is sitting on the silt, it’s not even floating, and you can see the fish in the middle.

“We’ve got 27C weather coming this week, we need to get some sort of emergency extracting licence pretty soon and get some tankers down there.”

Mr Donachie said that the office had started an investigation of the surrounding drainage infrastructure, which had already found a broken pipe, and revealed that a French drain in Blounts Court Road could be another potential contributor.

He said that while drainage in the Johnson Matthey car park at the corner of Blounts Court Road didn’t appear to drain towards the pond, the company alerted him to a missing section of pipe that does.

Mr Donachie said: “Our next steps are that we will continue to include the immediate drainage clearance and establish long-term maintenance partnerships with Oxfordshire County Council and we are exploring the possibility of a professional pond survey.

“Inspired Villages has given us the CCTV footage of the drains now, so we’re looking at that along with some more of their drainage information, which we are processing and we can put out an update shortly next week.”

Farmer Chris Colbeck told the meeting that he felt the that the sudden drop in water level was related to activity at the Inspired Villages development next to the pond. He said: “I think a very important part of this is that people need to understand that this water level has been dropping since last summer, or the autumn. It hasn’t happened overnight.

“You’re talking one million litres of water — that is an awful lot of water. To get an abstraction licence and build that pond up when it is losing 5,000 litres a day, yes, that would be a nice gesture, but I think the urgency is, what did the builders do?

“In the timescale of last summer, in the autumn, to alter the course of the natural flows of the pond, because it is in that time period that things went wrong.”

Vicky Boorman, who chairs the council, said that topographic surveys of the site had concluded that most of the water on the site doesn’t drain towards the pond.

She said: “We have been out to the Inspired Villages site to take photos and see what the situation is and we have also asked Inspired Villages to pull together some information on what they have done.

“The topographic and other surveys show the levels of the ground before they started work so you can see which way the water does drain.

“They couldn’t find any watercourse on site when they did those surveys, we are obviously checking those things to make sure as well.”