In AMP7, (the water industry’s regulatory asset management period for 2020 to 2025) the Office of Water Services (OFWAT) requires Water Companies to include a set of performance commitments relating specifically to new asset health performance, infrastructure resilience and sustainability.
OFWAT’s expectations for sewerage focus on five outcome delivery incentives
• External Sewer Flooding
• Internal Sewer Flooding
• Pollution Incidents
• Blockages
• Sewer Collapses
Water companies in England and Wales now face major penalties for flooding and pollution events on top of the cost of restoring an asset or repairing any damage.
Typical penalty costs and that of an internal flooding event, where a customer’s home is directly affected, can run into thousands of pounds, and water companies are targeted with a tight score for the number of breaches per years.
The good news is that the Government announced a multi-billion pound investment to tackle long-term flooding in July.
The £5.2 billion plan is to create around 2,000 new flood and coastal defences to better protect 336,000 properties in England by 2027. The plans also include £200 million for innovative projects such as sustainable drainage systems and nature-based solutions like temporary and permanent water storage areas.
A successful water management project recently completed to reduce pollution into local waterways is the Davyhulme wastewater treatment works in Manchester. Where Laing O’Rourke on behalf on United Utilities successfully installed precast box culverts.
The modernisation programme of the multimillion-pound project involved the remediation of previously abandoned land, followed by the construction of six circular primary settlement tanks and a large activated sludge plant with 10 circular final settlement tanks. This work lead to significant environmental benefits for the site, which resulted in outflow improvements, and subsequently the quality of water, entering the Manchester Ship Canal.
Both standard precast concrete box culverts and bespoke ‘made to order’ box culverts were supplied to the project, with Graham Flynn, Laing O’Rourke Project Director saying: “Our ability to maximise the benefits of modern, offsite construction and engineering techniques was central to our solution, meaning that we could deliver this complex scheme in a live environment with minimal disruption.”
The delivery team on the project comprised of design heavyweights Hyder Consulting and Mott MacDonald, who worked in collaboration with Laing O’Rourke; together the team has a proven record of accomplishment of designing and delivering some of the UK’s most complex water projects.