THAMES Water has been fined £8.55m for missing a leakage target by 47 million litres.

The company’s latest distinction was announced barely three months after it was fined £20m for spewing 1.4 billion litres of raw sewage into the Thames.

These volumes are a little hard to visualise, so I did a bit of calculating to help me get more of a handle on the numbers.

Imagine a cube-shaped tank measuring a metre to a side. That would hold 1,000 litres of water or raw sewage as the case may be.

Now imagine a square pool, 10 metres to a side and a metre deep. That would hold 100,000 litres.

A large cubic tank measuring 10 by 10 by 10 metres would hold a million litres.

Imagine 1,400 of those large tanks stacked on top of one another to make one big tank whose height easily exceeded the cruising altitude of most airliners.

Imagine that tank filled to the brim with raw sewage.

That is how much went into the Thames.

Now imagine 47 of those cubes stacked one on top of another to make a rather more modest tower of just 470 metres, or a little more than the distance from the ground to the pointy bit on the top of the Empire State Building where King Kong made his last stand. Imagine that filled to the brim with water.

That is how much Thames Water was fined for missing its leakage target by.

Its daily leakage target.

Now let’s think about pound coins. According to the Royal Mint, pound coins are 3.15mm thick.

Imagine a stack of pound coins whose height was 315km, or only about 85km less than the orbit of the International Space Station.

That’s how much Thames Water paid - £100m - to its investors in dividends in the 2016-17 financial year.

Bear with me; I have only one more mathematical marvel to share with you.

Imagine a stack of pound coins of a little over 170m in height, or a little over twice the height of the David Murray John Tower.

That’s the size of the annual bonus - £54,000 – paid to Thames Water chief executive Steve Robertson, according to the company’s latest figures.

Why didn't they see it coming

I DON’T usually believe in premonitions or psychic visions, but I think I had one the other day.

It happened after the announcement of the public inquiry into the Grenfell Tower atrocity.

Perhaps you had premonitions or visions, too.

Did you have a vision of certain VIPs given useful notice that their conduct is to be investigated? Did you have a vision of them merrily shredding every document, deleting every computer file and destroying any hard drive showing them in a bad light?

Did you have a vision of them securing the services of lawyers who charge more per hour than plenty of the dead made in a month or more?

Did you have a premonition of no politician, national or local, ever being punished in any way, shape or form over what happened, not even if they were clearly aware of potential dangers?

Not even if terrified residents told them, time and time again, that the block was in immense peril?

Did you have a premonition of not a single senior official ever being punished in any way, shape or form for what happened, not even if they, too, could scarcely have been any more aware of the danger?

Did you have a premonition of somebody important eventually telling us with a straight face: “Nobody could reasonably have been expected to foresee that wrapping all four sides of a tall building in flammable material might have terrible consequences?”

Did you have a premonition of that same important person telling us: “Lessons will be learned, and now it’s time to move on.”

Did you foresee all of that when the inquiry was announced?

Me too.

Of course, there has never been credible scientific proof of premonition or any other supernatural phenomenon. Perhaps those in charge of handling the aftermath of this disaster should do something to let us know we’re being silly.

They might want to start by arming themselves with warrants, bursting into certain offices - and perhaps homes – and grabbing every piece of relevant data they can lay their hands on.

Oh, and looking for mysterious gaps in that data which opened up over the last few days.

By doing so, they’d give us some welcome reassurance that they have our safety at heart.

On a somewhat related note, if they could find some way of ensuring we can attend a concert, our chosen place of worship or socialise with friends and not be at quite so much risk of being murdered by maniacs, that would be great, too.