Water & Wastewater Treatment

WWT August 2019

Water & Wastewater Treatment Magazine

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16 | XXXXX 20XX | WWT | www.wwtonline.co.uk The Works A s a project manager whose region includes Oxfordshire, I'm more aware than most of the volume of new development that's going on across the county. But it surprised me to learn from colleagues in Thames Water's developer services department that there are 17 housing developments planned in and around Wantage over the next 15 years. Together, these would mean an ad- ditional 6,000 homes being built in the historical market town and the nearby village of Grove – a 75 per cent increase in the area's population. A problem this posed was that the main trunk sewer running north This culminated in lengthy discus- sions with Persimmon Homes, who planned to build 2,500 properties on the former Grove Airfield site to the west of the town. Persimmon Homes required us to provide the development with waste capacity to serve their new homes. We in turn needed to avoid digging up the cen- tre of Wantage and Grove, where residents were already frustrated by disruption caused by local developments. We needed to rethink the traditional approach, which would either have meant a huge one-off project to upsize our trunk sewer, or repeatedly returning over the years to carry out piecemeal upgrades as new developments came on-line. Thames Water is radically re-engineering an Oxfordshire market town's sewer network to help developers prepare for unprecedented growth. Project manager Mark Yates explains how they did it Developing ideas 16 | AUGUST 2019 | WWT | www.wwtonline.co.uk through Wantage and Grove is already approaching capacity, due to local infill development. Without careful plan- ning, these development pressures could require a whole series of sewerage projects disrupting residents and busi- nesses to provide local reinforcement. With that in mind, Thames Water sought a way to avoid having to continually return to increase the size of their sewer. Our strategic planning and modelling teams began by liaising with a number of large developers planning major developments locally, to understand their build programmes and when they would need to connect to our sewerage network.

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