Latest News:

ORCA group is created!

Thank you so much to everyone who came to our event on Thursday 6th February for prospective water testers. We were delighted to see a full-house of enthusiastic and supportive people who were clearly interested, and prepared to take action to improve, the environment of the River Otter.  It was amazing to see 30 people sign-up to be testers - we will be in touch about the testing teams and training soon.

The plan is to test 12 sites from north of Honiton, down the river to South of Otterton on one day every 2 weeks. The top 7 sites have been visited and tested and the other 5 we will be visiting in the next 2 weeks. After that we will have fully updated instructions for each testing site. The training will start in early March, we will run a number of sessions for this.

We are also planning to establish ecological testing and some continuous monitoring using sonde devices in due course. There are meetings with MPs in the pipeline too.  

We have been looking for a name for this project, and have decided on ORCA , Otter River Catchment Action. We now need to work on a logo, ideas for this would be very welcome.

So ... welcome to the Otter River Catchment Action Group!

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’.