Yahoo Finance The petrol station spill that upended the lives of villagers
On a hot summer’s day in Bramley, sprawling roadworks are forcing drivers to sit in long traffic jams stretching out from each end of the village.
Yet this isn’t the only headache facing residents.
You also can’t drink any water from the taps, while manhole covers on the pavements are marked “DO NOT ENTER DANGER” owing to the risk of explosions.
None of this, it goes without saying, is normal in this part of the Surrey Hills, an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty where Jeremy Hunt, the Chancellor, has been the local MP since 2005.
But for exasperated residents and businesses, it’s starting to feel that way. For almost three years, they have been battling a petrol station spill that has upended village life.
“We’ve had so much thrown at us,” says Jane Austin, a councillor who lives locally. “And for a long time, nobody was even listening.
“Rather than improve, it just seems to have got worse and worse.”
Over an unknown period, at least 2,000 litres of petrol (no one knows exactly how much) leaked into the ground from a broken pipe underneath a petrol forecourt in Bramley.
When it rained, the fuel spread out into the water system, sewers, telephone ducts and the natural environment, including a river where iridescent layers of scum and dead fish have been found bobbing on the surface.
The slow-burning environmental disaster suddenly morphed into a full-blown crisis in May, when more than 600 households were told that the water from their taps was no longer safe to drink. Local schools, including the fee-paying St Catherine’s, of which the Queen is the official patron, have also been affected.
But the problem dates back as far as 2021, according to residents. And the fall-out has now ensnared some of Britain’s biggest businesses, including Asda, the Co-op, Openreach and Thames Water, as well as an alphabet soup of public bodies, including the Environment Agency (EA) and the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA).
Despite this, straight answers remain hard to come by, with complaints abound about a lack of clear leadership – with no public body taking full ownership of its resolution.
“Our goal is for somebody to put a plan in place to clean up the fuel that has run off into Bramley and for that plan to be implemented – that’s what we want,” says Helen Melia, a semi-retired solicitor who helps run the 300-strong Bramley Residents Action Group (Brag).
“Unfortunately, nobody is taking responsibility at the moment and we’re not getting enough information about what’s happening.”
The fuel leak’s ground zero is a petrol station currently run by Asda – the grocery chain majority-owned by private equity giant TDR Capital – which sits at the top of a gentle hill along Bramley’s main thoroughfare.
It was previously owned by the Co-op and a family-run company called Ultralink Services Limited.
The first sign something had gone wrong came in autumn 2021 when the brothers who own the Jolly Farmer pub – about 200 feet down the road – noticed a powerful, chemical smell emanating from their cellar.
“We had no idea what it was back then,” recalls Chris Hardstone, one of the two siblings.
“You would get here at eight in the morning and the smell would be blinding. We had to open all the doors and windows for hours just to make it habitable.
“We carried on but of course people noticed. We just didn’t know who to go to.”
The fire service told them it was most likely to be damp or mould. A call-out to the local gas company also found no problems.
“Eventually, we had a customer who came in and said, ‘I own two petrol stations – and that’s petrol,’” says Hardstone.
“At that point, we thought it was pretty obvious that because we had a petrol station nearby, that would be the culprit. But we couldn’t get the authorities interested. They said it must be run-off from a farmer’s field or a spill from a car.”
Around a year later, however, four dead trout were found in the village stream by volunteers who were doing checks after a storm.
That incident was reported to the EA but it would take months for anyone to take action.
By January 2023, telephone engineers were calling the fire service due to the smell of fumes coming out from a manhole next to a church that neighbours the petrol station.
It was only persistent complaints from locals – and interventions from Jeremy Hunt, who appealed to Waverley borough council, Surrey County Council and the EA’s chairman – that led to proper tests finally being ordered.
Yet incredibly, a pressure test of the pipes in February 2023 detected no problem – throwing investigators off the scent.
Later investigations carried out by environmental consultants hired by Asda, which was preparing to take over the petrol station from Co-op, soon confirmed evidence of the fuel leak by drilling boreholes under the forecourt.
They dug up the site and quickly found the culprit. A broken pipe that had been patched, wrongly, with a fibreglass panel, which had itself later failed. Exactly when or why the botched repair was made remains the subject of an ongoing investigation.
In addition to the natural environment, the fuel had contaminated Openreach’s telephone network ducts as well, making it dangerous for engineers to enter. The petrol also penetrated plastic pipes used by Thames Water, prompting the utility giant to issue gradually escalating warnings to St Catherine’s school and hundreds of surrounding households.
Further problems have quickly snowballed. For example, Openreach cannot carry out repairs on its network, leaving residents in the lurch if their broadband fails. (Some have turned to Elon Musk’s Starlink service instead.)
Meanwhile, Thames Water is replacing the plastic pipes with metal ones that should make it safe to drink tap water again by early July. But the company says progress partly depends on the clean-up currently being undertaken by Asda’s consultants, while its temporary roadworks have crippled businesses on Bramley’s High Street.
Ozzie Kabadayi, owner of Kingfish, a fish-and-chip shop, says customers don’t want to brave long traffic jams to come and collect food. He has been forced to turn to family members for loans to keep his business afloat.
“We’ve still got gas, electric, everything to pay,” he says. “I don’t know what we’re going to do.”
Owners of the local butcher, Kilfeather & Dumbrill, say they have also suffered a drop in trade. Their shop, which is full of artisan products and premium meats and cheeses, usually draws customers from Guildford and nearby villages.
“But at the moment people just aren’t stopping by and we’re missing those people,” says Tony Kilfeather, who runs the business jointly with Tim Dumbrill.
Some shops have stepped up home deliveries to compensate. But getting in and out of the town is arduous, with businesses that run by appointment like the local beauticians finding staff and customers cannot do so on time.
“We’ve started closing early in the afternoons at school pick-up time because the traffic gets so bad people can’t get in,” says Holli Bridger, a part-time assistant at her father Kim’s salon, KJ Hair Design.
It has also affected local volunteers for the Four Villages Wednesday Club, who bring elderly people to a day centre in the village for tea and coffee, quizzes, lunch and socialising once a week.
Sue Searle, the charity’s assistant manager, says: “Our drivers are having to give up much more of their time and take on extra costs, which they bear personally.”
One attendee and Bramley resident, 94-year-old Ros Horstead, says she loves the club, but adds: “You don’t want to come to Bramley at the moment, it is b----y difficult. Cleaning your teeth and cooking with bottled water is not easy either – it is no joke for the elderly.”
Despite all the disruption, accountability for the fuel leak – and leadership of the clean-up – is in short supply.
Surrey County Council stood down a “gold command” set-up to manage the process and has passed responsibilities on to Waverley borough council, which in turn insists it has no powers to intervene and merely chairs meetings of the various organisations.
Asda blames the spill on a “historic” problem that dates back to before its ownership of the petrol station, which it says it took over in October 2023. But it is at odds with the Co-op, which claims it handed over the site in October 2022 and is “not in any position to comment further”.
Ultralink, the previous owner before both of them, does not exist any more.
Getting any answers out of the EA is similarly fruitless, which says it cannot comment due to an ongoing investigation (and potential future prosecution), while the UK Health Security Agency – which has been working with Thames Water – says its role is “advisory rather than regulatory”.
Openreach says it may take a year to restore normal services but it is “highly dependent on other organisations”.
Hunt, who is campaigning to be re-elected as Conservative MP for the area in a tight contest with local Lib Dem Paul Follows, says he wants to see compensation paid to affected businesses.
“It’s the responsibility of the people who owned the petrol station before Asda because it looks like it was a botched repair job,” Hunt argues.
“Asda have tried to be constructive but there has been a lack of leadership and people have found it very frustrating that they can’t get the information they need.
“I don’t yet understand why this wasn’t detected – but I think situations like this where you have lots of different organisations involved are when you need strong local representatives.”
Meanwhile, back at the Jolly Farmer, landlord Chris Hardstone is counting the costs of missed opportunities and disruptions to trade – his pub is mostly empty.
“Everybody seems to think that we have all sorts of official bodies that will look into problems and work together,” he sighs. “But actually, it just seems to be a complete mess.”
