Continued rainfall across much of Yorkshire over the last week has led to a slight increase in groundwater and reservoir levels for the first time in eight months.
Yorkshire’s reservoirs stocks are now 30.8% – a 0.2% increase for the seven days to Monday. Heavy rainfall on Monday afternoon and into Tuesday morning will not have made its way through the catchment to the reservoirs.
The recent rainfall follows a historically dry first half of the year, drought declaration for Yorkshire by the Environment Agency in June, and the hottest summer on record in the county.
While the rain is welcome, hosepipe restrictions remain in place and will continue until reservoirs have recovered over the autumn and into winter. Yorkshire Water will continue to review resource levels and remove the restrictions once the reservoirs have recovered.
Dave Kaye, Yorkshire Water’s director of water services, said:
“With the start of autumn, we’ve seen a lot more rain. It’s incredibly welcome, and it has had a positive impact on our reservoirs and river levels. Further heavy rain earlier this week will still be making its way through the catchments, which will also contribute to improvements in reservoir and groundwater levels over the coming days.
“While this is positive, we still have a long way to go to get our reservoir levels back to where they need to be. Reservoirs are still the lowest they have ever been for this time of year, and we need this wet weather to continue throughout the autumn and winter.
“We were recently granted a number of drought orders and permits which allow us to abstract more water from the Ouse and the Wharfe and to reduce the flows out of reservoirs in the south and north-west of the region. This will lower the burden on our reservoirs, allowing them to recover during periods of rainfall like we have been seeing.
“We’re also asking customers to continue doing what they can to save water so that our reservoirs can benefit as much as possible during periods of rainfall – they've been doing a brilliant job so far, with demand down 10%.
“At the same time, we’re going to continue working hard at bringing leakage down. We’ve accelerated our response to leaks since the implementation of the hosepipe ban – completing repairs 33% faster, on average.”
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