Village beck turns brown as locals fear pollution

A village waterway has turned a "silty brown colour" - causing residents to fear construction of a nearby housing development could be polluting the water.

Friends of Silsden Beck, a volunteer group, said similar incidents had occurred a number of times since the start of construction on Persimmon's Cobbydale Rise estate on Bolton Road.

Persimmon admitted that one of its contractors had previously been responsible for river pollution, but that it had dismissed the company and halted work at the site for the past two weeks.

A spokesperson added it was working with the Environment Agency to investigate what the potential pollution sources could be.

Chris Tribe said the Friends of Silsden Beck believed it was run-off discharging into a culvert upstream.

"When we talk about pollution, you normally think of chemicals and fertilisers and that sort of thing. Really, it's just this silt, this colouring. But it will have an effect on the invertebrates that live in the river, which birds like dippers and kingfishers and fish live on," he said.

"Any silt getting into the river is not a good thing.

"It certainly doesn't look good. I mean, when the river is running all brown and horrible."

Tribe has an allotment on Bolton Road next to the development, and said pollution had been entering the local beck on and off for about nine months.

"All the rain we've had, I think it's been a problem for them, and at the moment they're still just doing excavations, they're not actually building any houses, so there's big piles of soil," he said.

"We are monitoring the situation in partnership with the Aire Rivers Trust and encourage people to report it to the Environment Agency."

An Environment Agency spokesperson said: "We encourage anyone who witnesses a pollution incident to report it to our 24-hour incident hotline as early as possible."

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