By Jay Harris, South West Water’s Head of Catchment for Waste Water Services.

Over the last few weeks our teams have been hard at work addressing the burst sewer we experienced in Exmouth last month. This has very much been a co-ordinated effort to not just repair the pipe but improve the area’s wastewater infrastructure for years to come.

This is a key priority for us and we fully appreciate how disruptive recent events have been for the local community. To give you an idea of the scale of this work, we have around 100 dedicated professionals from across our various teams working to put things right – from incident response and wastewater engineers to customer services and health and safety teams. Everyone is working hard to deliver an effective solution that protects us against future disruption.

Recent weather has not made things easy. Heavy rainfall has created some really difficult working conditions, but our teams continue to make good progress. A temporary solution is in place and working well, with 400-metre long pipes bypassing the damaged section of sewer that is currently out of action. These overland pipes are enabling us to transfer flows to Maer Lane treatment works as normal, protecting the environment and removing the need to use tankers, which we know can cause more disruption locally.

We have now turned our attention to thoroughly assessing the damaged section of sewer, as well as areas upstream and downstream of the pipe to look at what may need repairing or replacing. We are also looking to bring forward other areas of planned investment in Exmouth, and our expert team will use the results of our pipework inspections – using advanced CCTV technology – to decide how this can be achieved in the best possible way.

We are doing everything we can to make sure the network is fit for the future and I’d like to thank all of our teams, including those in our supply chain, who continue to work hard on the long-term solution for Exmouth.