All the water that we supply to our customers comes from rivers and groundwater aquifers in our local communities. Water cannot be manufactured, so we must rely upon the natural environment which is also vulnerable to a range of pressures.
A key part of our programme is to manage and mitigate these risks to ensure we provide the best quality and value of water for our customers.
A catchment can be defined as an area of land on which rain can fall and drain into a specific watercourse. This can be influenced by characteristics such as land-use type, geology and topography. Catchment characteristics can differ significantly between catchments and therefore present different pressures and challenges.
The aim of our catchment management team is to understand:
We complete this process in the form of Catchment Management Risk Assessments (CMRA’s). This is where we use standard methodologies such as walk-overs and aerial surveys to assess each of our drinking water catchments.
