Bristol Magistrates Court has ordered Glastonbury Festival Ltd to pay £31,000 after pollution went into the Whitelake River.

The organisers of Glastonbury Festival, the world’s biggest music festival, have been ordered to pay £31,000 in fines and costs for pollution offences involving human sewage.

More than 4km of the Whitelake River was polluted after approximately 20,000 gallons of untreated sewage escaped from a temporary storage tank on a farm at Pilton, near Shepton Mallet, on June 29, 2014. The pollution killed more than 40 fish and effectively wiped out the local trout population.

Glastonbury Festival plead guilty to the offence at an earlier hearing. The Environment Agency also asked that an incident from last year’s event involving overflow from a tank fed into by the festival’s ‘long drop’ toilets also be taken into consideration.