Water & Wastewater Treatment

10 WWT PUMP AND VALVE SUPPLEMENT 2018 Case Study L ast summer's prolonged heatwave put water companies under immense pressure to maintain supplies, with increased consumption exacerbating the challenges of reduced capacity on the network. The problems were particularly acute in East Anglia, where the temperatures reached record highs for record periods and farmers were forced to water their crops to protect yields. To address these severe conditions, Essex and Suffolk Water adopted a strategy of supplementing the existing infrastruc- ture by recommissioning disused assets in order to put more water into the supply chain. For the rural Norfolk villages north of Norwich, this meant re-activating a disused pumping station in the village of Horning and Sykes Pumps was brought in to provide a temporary pumping solution that would enable the use of an asset that had been out of service for 40 years. Flexible Solution The nearby pumping station at Belaugh provides the local area with 27 mega litres of water per day to Ormesby WTW, supported by abstraction from the Trinity Broads to meet the needs of local households, businesses and farms. However reduced rainfall and operational constraints meant that this capacity was compromised and Essex & Suffolk Water secured permission from the Environment Agency to resume abstraction from the area's main natural water source, the River Bure at Horning. To do this, the water company needed to re-activate the disused pumping station at Horning but, a‰er 40 years of inactivity, the existing pumps could not be used due to their age and state of repair. To work around this, Essex & Suffolk Water's contractor, Integrated Water Services, contacted Sykes Pumps to discuss a pumping solution that could abstract the 2-3 mega litres of water they estimated would be required to supple- ment the supply from Belaugh. The solution would need to use the existing pumping station to put the additional volume into the treatment works while overcoming the need to reactivate the existing pumps. "One of the challenges of the brief," explains Mark Burden from Integrated Water Services, "is that we didn't know how hot it was going to get or how long it would be until the dry period ended. Not only did this make the amount of water coming into the system unpredictable but it also made it hard to assess how much strain additional consumption would put on the network. Our aim was to generate an additional two to three mega litres of water per day but there had to be some flexibility in the solution because we didn't want to take more than was required but we had to be able to ensure continuity of supply." To ensure that the temporary pumping installation met Essex and Suffolk Water's Sykes Pumps helps secure continuity during water shortages A flexible pumping solution was key to ensuring water continued to flow in Essex and Suffolk during last summer's heatwave

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