Water & Wastewater Treatment

Project focus: private pumping stations surveying and adopting stations are finding that fewer of them are eligible for the transfer than originally envisaged. Mike Hartwell, Programme Manager at Dwr Cymru Welsh Water, says that of the 920 pumping stations the utility has located, only 510 meet the eligibility criteria for transfer; the other 410 will stay in private hands. Part of the reason for this is the definitions contained in the regulations: to be eligible for transfer, pumping stations must serve more than a single 'curtilage'. While in popular parlance this means more than a single property, it is not always that simple. A block of flats which share a freehold, for example, or a business park containing multiple businesses, may count as a single curtilage. Welsh Water has been adopting stations gradually since March 2014 and having taken on 195 so far, is confident of bringing them all up to standard within the deadline. "Once we've located the station we do a fairly detailed survey, and decide what needs to be done to make the station safe and serviceable, so that our operatives can maintain it in future," says Hartwell. "On the day we legally take control of the station, we go in there and do the upgrades, which can take anywhere between a day and a week, depending on what needs to be done; then we have a telemetry contractor who puts a telemetry system into every one of the stations, so from that day onward we'll have full monitoring of the station." The cost can vary widely for each job, from under £5000 for simply adding telemetry and basic maintenance, to some stations that need to be completely rebuilt at a cost of £100,000-£200,000. Ensuring health and safety for those accessing the assets in future is an important consideration in the upgrades, says Camis. "Our safe and serviceable specification has focused on the need to make sure that only Thames Water authorised people can gain access – so it's changing locks on kiosks, changing covers on wet wells, putting in safety grids below the lid. We supplement those works with electrical safety certificates, installing stainless steel li"ing chains, and so on." While the majority of pumping stations are in kiosks on the street, some are situated in gardens, garages or industrial premises, presenting access problems. The occasional one is in an even more inconvenient location, with examples found under bridges, in cellars or even in a house under a bed. "If a station is in a defined compound, with a fence around it, we will take transfer of the land in which the station sits," says Welsh Water's Hartwell. "But if the station is in somebody's back garden for example, then we would get the components of the station legally vested, and get a formal right of way agreed. It still relies to a certain extent on somebody being in – which is why we need to have all the details of the station, including access telephone numbers, on our telemetry help sheets, so if one of our operators needs to attend the station and there is a problem with access there is a number to call and solve the problem." Access can be a consideration even where a station is not eligible for transfer, because in many cases the rising main leading from the station is itself transferring under the parallel regulations for lateral drains. This means that in practice the water company still needs to hold information about the station and who is responsible should there be a future problem with the rising main. As well as Welsh Water, other water companies to have made a start on adopting stations include United Utilities and Severn Trent. Others will leave the majority until the deadline, in part because they have a more manageable number to deal with: Wessex Water, for example, has 500-600 stations to adopt, and despite surveying all of them, is only planning to take on around 50 of them in advance. But Anglian and Thames undoubtedly have the biggest task on their hands. Anglian has set itself the demanding task of adopting 70 stations per month from next month onwards, while Thames's plans imply an even faster rate. Adoption in 2016 is not the end of the story: the sheer variety of the designs of the adopted pumping stations will present an ongoing challenge to companies' operational maintenance teams. • Private Pumping Stations Adoption: The Background ● The Public Health Act of 1936 put all existing sewers into public ownership, but many properties built since then have been built with private drains and sewers leading into the public network. Many of these used small pumping stations where gravity solutions were insufficient ● Householders in properties served by private drains and sewers were o en barely aware of the fact until they were hit by unexpected costs ● To remedy this, the Water Industry (Schemes for Adoption of Private Sewers) Regulations 2011 mandated the transfer of all private sewers, lateral drains and pumping stations to water and sewerage companies ● While private sewers were transferred in 2011, the transfer of pumping stations and lateral drains was delayed until 1st October 2016 since these assets were seen as more problematic 22 | AUGUST 2015 | WWT | www.wwtonline.co.uk Private pumping stations come in all shapes and sizes

• Cover