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Report your incidents

Instructions on how to report an incident at your reservoir.

Whilst being of benefit to society, dams also have the potential to cause great damage and loss of life. Although dam failure is very rare, serious incidents do arise at UK reservoirs each year. We've developed a system of post-incident reporting and investigation with Halcrow Group Ltd. This allows incidents at reservoirs to be recorded and reported in a consistent manner.  

What to do if an incident occurs at your reservoir

1. If an incident occurs at your reservoir contact your supervising engineer and, if necessary, our incident hotline on 0800 80 70 60.  

2. Once the incident is under control you need to report it to our Reservoir Safety Team on 01392 442001 (9am-5pm Monday to Friday). We’ll need the reservoir name, location and your contact details. We may require you to complete a post-incident report form.

What we do with this information

Our aim is to ensure that information on incidents is gathered to inform learning and research. We do not use information provided as part of post-incident reporting to instigate enforcement action under the Reservoirs Act 1975. The lessons learnt from these incidents are shared with the reservoir industry in an annual report to promote reservoir safety.

If you would like a copy of one of our previous annual reports please email us.

Good practice

We have used real examples to provide an insight into an incident (or groups of incidents) where there are particular lessons that should be shared with the reservoir industry.