Latest News:

Become a Citizen Science volunteer and help clean our river.

• Join on your own –or make up your own team of 2-4 volunteers
• Commit to ½ to 1 day of testing, every two months, starting March 2025
• All test and safety kit provided to teams
• Free, comprehensive training course –with our other CSI volunteers
• Access to the latest testing data and regular newsletters
• Share your experiences in your local Facebook or social media groups

Find out more & help clean up our river. 

• Come along to: Kings Arms, Otterton. 6th February @ 6.30pm 
• Or email: [email protected]

Articles of Interest:

The River Otter flows from its source in the Blackdown hills just north of Otterford, to the sea at Budleigh Salterton. During it’s course it is joined by three tributaries, the Tale, the Wolf and the Love. The Otter should epitomise England’s ecologically rich and diverse river habitats. Unfortunately, the Middle and Lower sections of the River Otter are both classified by the Environment Agency (EA) as ‘Poor Ecological Status’. This puts the River Otter in the worst 20% of the UK’s rivers, with significant impacts on plant life, wildlife and fish populations.

So, the OVA setup the water quality group to explore how we can address the significant pollution issues in the river Otter catchment.  We currently meet every 6 weeks and have small groups working on water testing, farming , liaison with South West Water (SWW), planning, communications and partnerships.

It is clear from Environment Agency (EA)  reports that farming and pollution from sewage spills are the main factors affecting the water quality in the Otter. There is publicly available data regarding the number of hours of sewage spills. This shows that there are several sewage works with a high number of hours of untreated discharge.

The largest number of raw sewage discharge hours are from the Honiton treatment works, up 63% from 2,820 hrs in 2023 to 4,604 hrs in the first 10 months of 2024.  While we are showing here the top-5 in terms of discharges, it is worth noting that along the entire length of the river Otter there are 23 SWW assets – showing a 36% increase in the first 10 months of 2024 compared to the whole of 2023.

There is no requirement for South West water to measure the volume of sewage discharge just the number of hours. Honiton in particular is a large sewage works so we are concerned that very large quantities of untreated sewage is entering the Otter and impacting the ecology of the river. The types of farming along the Otter that are most likely to be negatively affecting the water quality are dairy farming, higher up the catchment and maize growing . 

In order to improve the water environment of the river we propose to tackle the issue from several angles:

• Firstly, we want to raise awareness. There are groups campaigning on many rivers around the country, but the pollution in the Otter has been largely unnoticed. Ensuring that local people, councils and politicians throughout the Otter catchment are aware of the problem is essential. 
• We then want to demonstrate where on the river the largest rises in pollutants occur and focus our efforts on these areas. To do this we are proposing our own comprehensive testing strategy to provide the robust and informative data that we need. This will include citizen science tests, the use of continuous monitoring devices (Sondes) and ecological testing. We will share our data regularly on our website.
• We are looking carefully at the house building specified in the East Devon local plan so that we can highlight areas where sewage capacity is stretched and try to ensure sewage works are upgraded before new households are added to system
• In all of this we are forming partnerships with those organisations already testing on the river and those with expertise in water management and farming.

We welcome any input into our plans and of course any expressions of interest to join our group of water testers. Our goal is that by 2028 the ecological status of all sections of the river Otter should be classified ‘moderate’ or ideally ‘good’.