Utility Week

24 | 20TH - 26TH JULY 2018 | UTILITY WEEK Operations & Assets Utility Week Awards winner case study Capital Project Management Award Award winner: Anglian Water • Title of project/initiative: The Graam Resilience Scheme • Annual company turnover: £1.2 million • Number of directly-employed staff: 4,000 Entry criteria: • Entry criteria: Quality of entry (clear, evidence based etc) • On time and on budget • Relationship with supply chain • Impact on customers and wider community • Health and safety performance • Evidence of innovation The Utility Week Awards are held in asso- ciation with CGI and Capgemini. The 2018 Utility Week Awards have now been launched. See pages 28-29, and https://www.utilityweekawards.co.uk/ For sponsorship opportunities please contact Utility Week business devel- opment manager Ben Hammond on benhammond@fav-house.com or 01342 332116 for more information T he £28 million Graam Resilience Scheme is an innovative programme from Anglian Water that reverses water flow in the event of an emergency. Seventy-five per cent of the 829,000 peo- ple in the Huntingdon, Northampton and Bedford areas served by Graam Water Treatment Works would be affected in the event of an outage in its network. So to combat the risk, Anglian wanted to install a major water main between Hanning- ton Reservoir and Graam. But it transpired that route would have presented significant hurdles for the company, with river crossings and urban areas among the obstacles in the way. The resilience scheme at Graam has achieved the same outcome, but at half the cost. It has also cut embodied carbon by 61 per cent (26,845 tonnes), compared with what would have been used by the Hanning- ton water main. What was the scale of the project? To deal with these challenges, Anglian had to come up with a radical approach. Through ground-breaking adjustments, monitoring the pipe network and new ways of working, the team successfully allowed the reversal of flow through one of the existing water mains. During the project the team made 56 con- nections to live water mains without any interruption to customers. A typical regional operations team would undertake just 26 such connections annually. The largest such connection had the potential to affect 400,000 customers, but through efficient execution, none were affected. Over the course of the project, a total of 6,000 cubic metres of concrete was used to construct the reservoir tank, mak- ing it the largest pre-cast storage reservoir in Europe. The new storage reservoir holds 40 mil- lion litres of treated drinking water, equiva- lent to 16 Olympic-sized swimming pools. If a kitchen tap was turned on in one corner it would take five years to drain the reservoir. What was the target group? Anglian serves some of the fastest-growing parts of the UK, and with significant popula- tion growth predicted over the next 25 years the company needs ever-resilient systems to meet the challenges of this growth, as well as to protect the environment. It is forecast that more than a quarter of a million new homes will be built by 2036 and more than 380,000 jobs are expected to be created across Cambridgeshire, Bedfordshire A total of 6,000 cubic metres of concrete was used to construct the reservoir tank, making it the largest pre-cast storage reservoir in Europe. Going green was capital idea Anglian Water won the 2017 Utility Week Capital Project Management Award for its Graam Resilience Scheme. We look at how this £28 million ground-breaking project was delivered.

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