Severn Trent Water has sent its waste water team to a local ‘sewer blockage hotspot’ in Bentilee, Staffordshire, to identify any potential sewer issues and to talk to customers to gain a better understanding of how to prevent it.

Locations visited by the team during the one day event included the local school, neighbourhood centre, health centre and local day nurseries, to speak to the community about the water company’s education programme.

Laura Williams, customer and community lead, explained:

“We know that there are certain areas in our region where sewer blockage numbers are much higher than anywhere else. Bentilee is one of those places. We spend a lot of time and money unblocking sewers, so we decided to go and visit the area to see if we could understand both why this is happening and what we can do to prevent it.”

The team discovered that the main problem in the area is wipes being flushed down the toilet – they found that many people were unaware of the issues being caused by so called ‘flushable’ wipes. Laura Williams commented:

 “It’s easy to assume that the wipes will just flush away, like toilet tissue, but the reality is that they don’t break down – they’re not designed to, and so they can get caught on snags or just bunch up, building up and blocking the drain or sewer. “

During the day, as well as wipes, the team also found rods, scaffolding clips and house bricks blocking sewers, together with numerous pipes that weren’t connected to the sewer system properly. Severn Trent is now planning swift action to deal with the issues to avoid any potential problems in the future.