Worried about water? Yes, we all should be...

IF you thought the weekend's deluges could be taken as a sign that our water shortage worries are behind us, may I ask you to pause the celebrations and consider one rather sobering statistic.

- Chris Rundle

Which is that Wimbleball reservoir, sited high on the Brendon hills and supplying huge swathes of Somerset and Devon, is scarcely overbrimming. To be precise it is but 30 per cent full. Which is somewhat worrying given that so many thousands of households depend on it to keep their taps running.

Wimbleball is so depleted as a result of successive hot summers and dry springs. It has been particularly adversely affected - as has every other storage facility in the country - as a result of rainfall being below average for eight out of the ten months of this year.

‘And while you may argue that on the basis of the law of averages what remains of the year is going to be exceptionally wet, on the balance of probabilities it won't be. Which means that we could all be in trouble next summer.

‘The water situation - for farmers as well as domestic consumers - is critical enough for the Environment Agency to have run up the storm cone and released an alarming report last week. It is hardly encouraging: the predictions are pointing at exceptionally dry conditions setting in from the end of this month until the beginning of February.