Review of historical reservoir incident data in England

Since 2013 it has been mandatory for incidents on statutory reservoirs in England to be reported to the Environment Agency using the incident report template. It is expected that both an initial incident report and a post-incident report will be submitted. The Environment Agency is working on the Reservoir Safety Reform programme, the purpose of which is to update reservoir legislation following the publication of the Balmforth report in 2021. As part of recommendation 9 in the Balmforth report, a new online database for reservoir incidents has been created by the Environment Agency, Natural Resources Wales, and the Institution of Civil Engineers. As part of the creation of the new reservoir incidents database, all reservoir incident data between 2004 and 2024 held by the Environment Agency was reviewed. During this task trends were identified in the historical incident data which influenced the new database. This paper will focus on the analysis of the historical reservoir incident data in England held by the Environment Agency and the lessons learnt from this.