Thames Water has said that it has spent over £4.5m this winter pumping out sewers to stop them overflowing after the region was saturated by unprecedented rainfall.
The London drainage company said that they were left with no choice but to pump sewage away from some locations after the water table level rose to record heights.
Locations where sewer tankers have been pumping sewage include Playhatch and Lambourn. The waste water company said that because the ground is still saturated they see no way of protecting homes other than pumping the sewage away for the “foreseeable future”.
One resident from Playhatch spoke to the BBC, he said he had lived with a “lake of raw sewage” which had appeared intermittently around his home since the beginning of December.
A Thames Water spokesperson said:
“In places like Playhatch we are having to get tanker lorries to suck out excess waste water in our sewers to stop those sewers flooding.”
He also said that while they were doing their best there was only so much they could achieve, he continued:
“We are essentially trying to pump a river dry, which we can never achieve,”