A year on from the landmark launch of Southern Water’s £1.5billion Clean Rivers and Seas Plan, great strides have been made forward on the Isle of Wight by preventing 300 spills over the last 2 years.
The Island has proven to be a perfect testing ground for the use of innovative engineering and nature-based solutions – designed to stop or slow rainfall entering sewers, and when volumes are high, overloading the network of pipes, pumping stations and treatment sites.
It is this hydraulic overload which can result in the storm overflows being activated and flows being released into the environment, rather than causing homes and communities to be flooded.
On the Isle of Wight, the Clean Rivers and Seas Task Force have been busy assessing every area of the Southern Water network and taking action, including upgrading pumping stations to increase their capacity, installing thousands of water butts in customers’ gardens to capture rainfall, and partnering with key organisations like Isle of Wight Council to work together on tackling the causes of storm overflows.
This work has already helped to reduce storm overflows along the Island’s coastline – one example where this has made a real difference is Appley. The site’s storage has been quadrupled and the flow rate doubled – this has helped prevent 88 spills between May and September this year.
Keith Herbert, Pathfinder Delivery Lead West for Southern Water, has said:
“We’re really pleased that our work on the Isle of Wight is really starting to bear fruit now, and that our range of interventions are making a real difference with 300 spills prevented over two years.
“Our teams have been working really hard, but it hasn’t been easy. We experienced the wettest 18 months on record since 1836 between October of 2022 and March of 2024, which resulted in flooding across the island in both years.
Article continues below this advertisement “We know we still have a long way to go but a year on from the launch of our Clean Rivers and Seas Plan, we are excited to be in the final stages of scaling up many of our solutions so we can prevent even more spills.”
Other areas of success include:
Wootton: Replaced a storm overflow pipe causing flow restriction and its headwall, a protective measure to stop turbulent water degrading the new pipe. This upgrade will prevent flooding in local properties and has decreased releases from the nearby storm overflow.
Cowes: Optimised Marsh Road pumping station to use existing storage and relieve pressure on the downstream pumping station. Southern Water have seen a storm overflow reduction of approximately 60% at Marsh Road pumping station due to the removal of the surface water flow from a large development, alongside other slow the flow methods.
Cowes: Southern Water optimised pipework underneath Terminus Road that caused water to back up into the sewer system triggering storm overflows. They replaced this pipework and installed AI technology (a smart sewer gate. Since completion, there have been no storm overflow releases from the Terminus Road overflow, despite heavy and frequent rainfall. This has helped prevent 88 storm overflows since December last year.
Havenstreet: Southern Water found that surface water draining was a real issue at Havenstreet. Work in the area has helped slow the flow of water entering the sewers by offering residents water butts. Southern Water has extended the water butt scheme to Cowes, Gurnard, Fishbourne, Wotton, Yarmouth and Freshwater
Yarmouth: Teams have installed a tidal ingress protection flap to relieve the pressure of high tides on the storm overflow outfall. This has kept equipment working properly and reduce emergency alarms and storm overflows at Norton Spit.
Binstead: Offered free household SuDS to reduce flood incidents and surface water as well as working with the Isle of Wight Council to improve the local flood strategy along with trialling a new repaving scheme.
New partnerships: Isle of Wight Council and Southern Water have agreed a new partnership to transform roads across the island in an effort to cut storm overflows and flood risks.
