A sewer has burst at Appley Park in Ryde once again, with Southern Water mounting an emergency response involving tankers and the closure of Appley Car Park.
A large hole has been dug in the middle of the park as crews work to locate and repair the burst, which is near Appley Park Transfer Wastewater Pumping Station.
Appley Car Park has been closed and taken over by Southern Water, with tankers drafted into the area to help manage wastewater flows.
It is the latest in a lengthy history of sewer problems at Appley, including a catastrophic collapse in January 2021 when a sinkhole appeared on the footpath between Appley and Puckpool. Investigations revealed that a 1-metre-wide sewer carrying all of Ryde’s wastewater had collapsed deep underground.
By April 2021, the operation had already cost £2.5million and works continued throughout the year. Concerns were subsequently raised over the possibility of further sections of the buried sewer collapsing, leading to additional work being carried out.
The area was finally reinstated and reopened in April 2022 – 15 months after the sinkhole first appeared and following a total spend of £7million.
Appley has also repeatedly been used as a base for emergency measures when other parts of the wider sewer network between Ryde and Sandown have failed.
In July 2023, temporary holding tanks and an army of tankers were deployed at Appley while Southern Water repaired a burst pressurised sewer around 6 miles away at Yaverland.
More than 15 large sewage storage containers were then installed in Appley Car Park in February 2024 as part of the response to another major sewer failure, this time near West Lane in Brading.
Problems returned directly to Appley in November 2024, when a burst rising main on Appley Road sparked a major repair operation and saw tankers brought into Ryde. The affected pipe carries wastewater from Ryde and Seaview towards Sandown Wastewater Treatment Works.
Further trouble followed at Appley Park in July 2025, when another sewer leak resulted in contractors fencing off an area of woodland and using tankers to remove sewage.
Just months later, in October 2025, Southern Water was back at Appley Park dealing with a burst sewer, with tankers and temporary storage tanks deployed once again.
Now, less than a year later, crews have returned to Appley following the latest burst.
A spokesperson for Southern Water said:
“Our teams are currently carrying out repairs to a burst sewer at Appley. To maintain services while this work is completed, temporary pumping and tankering arrangements are in place, which will result in increased tanker movements in the area.
“Appley Car Park is expected to be closed for around a week, although this could extend to up to two weeks depending on the progress of the repairs. We’re sorry for the disruption this is causing.”
Anyone still think that privatisation of vital national infrastructure was a good idea?
Or are we finally in agreement that Thatcherism was a failed experiment.
not sure you can class the socioeconomic disaster that was Thatcherism, and its evolution into extreme capitalism, as an ‘experiment’.
from the perspective of public services and the average UK citizen, it
certainly has been an absolute calamity.
What has that got to do with the geology of the IOW.
Best go to North Korea.
If you understand opposition to the disastrous Thatcherite obsession with neoliberal economic ideology to be tacit support for unitary communism, you need to give your head a wobble.
There are nuanced political ideologies between those two extremist positions.
sounds to me like the original work done to pipe all the sewage over to the treatment works in Sandown, was done on the cheap, and was sub-standard.
no doubt the SW executives in charge at the time all got their massive bonuses, for doing such an excellent job (at the bill payers expense).
And to think! The council have agreed to allow Captiva building just shy of half a thousand houses at the top of this hill.
And all those new house will going into this outdate sewage pipe! – local residents and councillors have highlighted these issues for the last 10 years but the council and Southern Water did not listen..
That’s answers why I couldn’t buy any brown envelopes.
All shops had sold out.
That’ll be the AI…. Anal Ineptitude !!!!!
Poor workmanship, the Island needs to bring over a
Mainland Company who know what they are doing,
not a bunch of useless locals who don’t have a clue
what they are doing,.
My beach hut was right by the sinkhole- only I sold it because the fees were going up. The buyer had one good, very good year, then Covid struck and the lockdown. Then the area and the indispensible car park was pretty much closed off with the protracted repairs.