Sewage flooding advice

Flooding from sewers can be caused by a number of things. We aim to provide adequate capacity in our sewers to protect homes from flooding. A significant risk of flooding comes from heavy rainstorms when the surface water enters the sewer.

We plan to protect the inside of your property against flooding, however there may be extreme events which we cannot protect against. If there is a blockage in our sewer or a pumping station breakdown, which disrupts services and threatens to flood houses we will have a representative on site as soon as possible.

We will respond to reports of internal sewage flooding within four hours of being notified. If flooding from the public sewer affects your property internally, we will automatically refund your sewerage bill for each internal flooding incident up to a maximum of £1000 for each incident.

We will consider providing temporary accommodation if your property has become uninhabitable as a result of our negligence and we will also consider any additional expenses, where any flooding is proved to be our fault. These claims can be made up to 12 months after the event, however in such cases supporting evidence such as photographs may be necessary.

After a flooding event

Once the flooding has subsided we will look into the cause and identify what can be done to prevent the flooding happening again, as far as is practicable in the given circumstances. There are limitations on what we can do. We cannot influence such events as storms, but we can try to manage the impact of those events to minimise the impact to our customers. We may look at the capacity of the sewer and assess the amount of rainfall in the area at the time of the flooding, as well as the way the apparatus was performing before, during and after an event. These investigations can take weeks rather than days to complete. Throughout our investigations we will endeavour to keep you informed.