Dr Toby Willison, Director of Environment and Corporate Affairs, said:
“I share your desire to ensure that the recent incident at Nursling never happens again. That’s why we’ve been in touch with some of the local businesses and have issued official warnings about potential breaches of Section 111 of the Water Industry Act 1991. We’ve put them on notice that we’ll be looking to recover our costs incurred in the voluntary assistance we have given to help them to minimise and clean up their pollutions and we’re liaising with the EA and will assist them should they choose to take any enforcement.
“We’re not the polluter in this incident. Indeed we offered significant assistance in terms of spill response and remediation works. We’re responsible for public sewers and we take that responsibility seriously. That’s why there are boons installed across the river at the outfall location to catch errant flows of oils and other substances that might reach our public sewer from a private sewer. These have been in place for some time and we will continue to maintain these, although they could never be expected to contain a catastrophic diesel loss such as the one experienced in the recent event. We’re not responsible for private sewers which take flows from a single property to the public sewer. These remain the responsibility of the property owner. The National Highways are responsible for highways drainage on the roads they maintain.
“It is misplaced to suggest a review and upgrade of our outfall, through which oil reached the River Test during this incident, will ensure this never happens again. Our focus must be on ensuring those connected to the surface water network do not discharge anything other than surface water to this sewerage system and have their own fail-safe pollution protocols in place.
“This is something that is more appropriately tackled with enforcement action and in the further education of those connected to surface water networks. This is exactly the action we have and will continue to take to ensure we can meet your expectation that this type of incident doesn’t happen again.
“We share a common goal to protect the precious habitat of the River Test which is so important to local people, visitors and the economy of the area. You have my assurance we are taking the most appropriate steps to ensure that’s what happens.
“We’re grateful we had this opportunity to work with you, we learned a lot from the experience and we’ll be using what we’ve learned to develop new ways to continue to have open and honest conversations with our customers.”