South West Water’s Dawlish Early Start Storm Overflow (ESSO) programme is a key contribution to the utility’s zero‑pollution objectives, targeting spill reduction across a highly constrained coastal catchment discharging to a designated bathing water. Working collaboratively with South West Water, AECOM has developed an integrated storm‑screening, storage, and pumping upgrade strategy to improve system performance under increasingly intense storm and rainfall conditions. The design places strong emphasis on process control and network resilience. Enhanced level monitoring, coordinated pump sequencing, and improved inter‑site telemetry enable distributed storm‑storage assets to be used more effectively, reducing avoidable CSO activations. Resilience measures such as independent alarms, manual back‑up control modes, and engineered protection against hydraulic surges provide robust operation during equipment or communication failures. Process safety has been embedded throughout via a structured HazOp involving SWW operational and maintenance teams. This informed critical improvements to control logic, bypass arrangements, safe‑isolation procedures and alarm management. HazOp outputs also directly shaped access design, lifting provisions and maintenance methodologies at constrained CSO and pumping locations to ensure safe, reliable long‑term operation. Through combining resilience‑led process control with safety‑driven design, South West Water and AECOM are delivering a more robust, operable, and future‑ready stormwater system for this sensitive coastal environment.