The Environment Agency has now supplied to me a list of locations of large raised reservoirs in England, with permission to re-use the information under the Open Government Licence.
This follows from a decision notice served in October by the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO).
I have geocoded the list and published it as an open data download on my Datadaptive site, in CSV, KMZ and Shapefile formats. I've also made an interactive map of reservoir locations.
A large raised reservoir is a structure that holds 25,000 cubic metres or more of water above ground level. In England these reservoirs are regulated by the EA under the Reservoirs Act 1975 as amended by the Flood and Water Management Act 2010.
The list was supplied in the form of a report extracted from the EA's public register of reservoirs and dated 2 November 2020. The report includes, for each reservoir:
- the name,
- a National Grid reference,
- details of the "undertaker", i.e. the person or organisation that uses or owns the reservoir,
- details of the engineer appointed to inspect the reservoir,
- characteristics of the reservoir, such as dam type and capacity, and
- a risk designation; most reservoirs are "high risk".
Disclosure of the report was a partial response to information requests I submitted to the EA in early August 2019. I've written about those requests in a separate blog post.
Although the list of reservoirs is nominally a "public register", it does not appear on the EA's public register site. A metadata record describing the register was removed from Data.gov.uk shortly after I made my information request.
For reasons of data protection, the open data download does not contain the full information in the public register report. However, if you want a copy of the public register report, I've made a template that you can use to submit your own information request to the Environment Agency.
Image credit: Ladybower Reservoir, Derbyshire by Arran Bee (CC BY 2.0)