Southern Water – power supply failure to Weatherlees Hill Wastewater Treatment Works

Good evening,

Just to let you know that, following a loss of power supply by UK Power Networks at around 19:00hrs this evening, our Weatherlees treatment works unfortunately shut down.

This automatically caused our Margate wastewater pumping station to stop transferring flows to it, in order to prevent our Weatherlees site from flooding.

As this incident coincided with the very heavy rain from Storm Goretti, our storm storage at our Margate pumping station filled very quickly and the site started spilling screened wastewater and stormwater, via its Long Sea (2,200m long) and Short Sea (824m long) outfalls, from around 20:30hrs.

Power has now been restored at our Weatherlees site and the team is in the process of getting the site fully up and running to allow flows from Margate pumping station to be reinstated.

We have informed the Environment Agency and will be undertaking beach checks and sampling in the morning.

Customer facilities in the area have been unaffected throughout.

We will provide further updates tomorrow (Friday).

With kind regards,

Nick

Nick Davis

Stakeholder Engagement Manager

southernwater.co.uk