A woman who once had a successful business says she now lives on toast and cereal. Angela Jones spends long days on the river gathering data on water pollution from sewage, agriculture, and industry.
Their data published in 2024 uncovered areas of the Usk being pumped into directly by Welsh Water from its sewage treatment works and combined sewer overflows are failing drastically against targets set by the regulator Natural Resources Wales . Welsh Water blames farmers among others for the majority of river pollution in Wales and claims it contributes a small percentage.
Now she says her life is “practically 24/7” focused on river health – from testing to giving lectures at schools and colleges to highlighting the crisis at Westminster. “It’s not about my business. For me it’s about what this is doing to our rivers and the wildlife – our ecology,” she said. "I’m not academic in the slightest. I’m dyslexic and always struggled in school. I saw school as an 11-year prison term. Dyslexia wasn’t understood back then and I’d be punished terribly.”
"What I’m doing is taking people on trips away like to Snowdonia where the water is clean. But I’m losing money by doing that.” All her life she’s felt instinctively connected to nature – so much so she made her daughter the first child ever to be christened on the top of Yr Wyddfa . “Before my daughter was born the doctor there told me she’d have a high chance of being severely disabled and they advised me to terminate,” she recalled.
“My children were brought up on fun and adventures. When they were young I went to an auction and bought a barn in the countryside which needed a lot of work. I had £500 left so we bought a very cheap caravan and lived in that for two years while we renovated the barn.