The week of 16th to 22nd Spetember is The WI Week of River Action.

Last year, during the WI Week of River Action, our research showed that:

In 2022 The Brockenhurst sewer storm overflow spilled 58 times for a total of 482.95 hours, discharging into the Lymington River. This equated to around 20 Days of spillage.

When we looked at the latest research, we were shocked to find out that:

In 2023, this sewer storm overflow spilled 130 times for a total of 2,051.67 hours, discharging into the Lymington River. This equates to around 85 Days of spillage! (SOURCE: https://theriverstrust.org/sewage-map)

• This is a 224% increase in overflow occurrences.
• This is a 425% increase in the hours of spillage.
• This is an increase from 20 days spillage in 2022 to 85 days spillage in 2023!

This is really saddening as the New Forest is a Special Site of Scientific Interest (SSSI), a Special Area of Conservation (SAC), and a Ramsar site as a Wetland of International. This makes it especially important to protect our rivers in this special area that we live in.

We have events planned this week which we will report on.

Our members have been busy with Craftivism and have made this great knitted banner:

We’ve also made some bunting (which we will reveal later!)

During The WI Week of River Action we are going to do bring awareness and suggest ways we can all do our bit to clean up our rivers.

We will aim to to daily updates this week, so watch this space!