Return of salmon caps oil-slick river's recovery (From The Northern Echo)

Return of salmon caps oil-slick river's recovery

11:40am Tuesday 7th September 2010 in

• Skip social links
• Print
• Email
• Comments(0)

JUST two weeks after thieves caused a hundred gallons of heating oil to ooze into a North-East river, environmental experts and fisherman claim the river has made a miraculous recovery.

Reports of large trout, barbel, and even the elusive salmon show the Skerne in Darlington has bounced back from decades of pollution, including the most recent incident.

The spill was caused by thieves stealing a tap from an oil tank at a plant nursery on Barmpton Lane.

Swift action from the Environment Agency appears to have contained the contamination from a kilometre-long slick of oil.

Absorbent booms were placed on the river on August 25 after the oil poured into the river.

But an agency spokeswoman said last night the booms would be removed over the next few days after analysis showed the measures had succeeded.

Fisherman Paul Scott, of Springfield, Darlington, believes he has his own evidence of the successful containment after landing a 3lb 9oz brown trout earlier this week from a pool about a mile downstream from where the booms are placed.

He said: "It has surprised me a great deal, I've always lived in the town and it is not somewhere, until recently, where I thought you could fish successfully.

"When I was a child it was full of shopping trolleys, but not anymore."

The Skerne runs from Trimdon in County Durham, through Darlington, to Hurworth, where it joins the Tees.

Richard Jenkins, of the Environment Agency's fisheries team, said the river had been transformed over the last twenty years. Evidence of salmon had been found on the river's lower reaches, he said.

"In the early Nineties, there was not a lot living in the river at all, certainly nothing upstream," he added.

"But as the water quality has improved, and since the fish pass was built at South Park in 1994, we have seen some quite reasonable fish stocks in Darlington, all the way up to Newton Aycliffe."

Species found in the Skerne include trout, chub, barbel and dace, upstream, and roach and grayling, nearer the Tees.

*Anyone over the age of 12 must have an Environment Agency rod licence to fish in the UK. Visit environment-agency.gov.uk for more information.