As a result of the extreme weather events on New Year’s Eve, we have had to effect our emergency shut down procedures at our site at Lostock.
With the flooding of local water courses, including Wade Brook, which is situated close to our Lostock site, we had to shut the site down for safety and environmental reasons. Flooding has unfortunately affected the site and caused significant damage to vital equipment.
As it was an emergency situation, we were unable to provide advanced warning to the local community as we usually do. Thankfully, by shutting the site down quickly we have managed to avoid any more serious environmental issues. Unfortunately, the shutdown does mean that we are required to vent steam until we can fully restart the plant which means that the local community will experience the noise which steam venting inevitably causes.
We are continuing to clean up from the flooding and to assess the extent of the flood damage to vital equipment such as pumps and motors. We hope to restart the plant as quickly as possible but there is the potential for other equipment to have been damaged by the emergency shutdown, so we are unable at this stage to put a timeframe on restarting.
We apologise for the disturbance caused by the noise and will do our utmost to keep this to as short a duration as possible.