Water & Wastewater Treatment

4 | august 2015 | WWt | www.wwtonline.co.uk Industry news August Thames Water has named the special purpose company Bazalgette Tunnel as the preferred bidder to deliver the Thames Tideway Tunnel. The consortium, made up of Allianz, Amber Infrastructure Group, Dalmore Capital Limited and DIF, is in line to own, finance and deliver the £4.2BN super sewer project. This bid was chosen ahead of a rival consortium that was led by Canadian pension fund Borealis in the final "revise and confirm" round. Thames Water has managed the procurement process for the infrastructure provider, which will be independent from the water company and have its own licence from Ofwat, as well as selecting the contractors that will build the tunnel. Bazalgette Tunnel Limited will now take over responsibility for managing the contractors and overseeing the Bazalgette Tunnel to deliver Thames 'super sewer' Contract Tracker B&V wins £56M Oldham contract Black & Veatch has been awarded a £56M contract by united utilities to deliv- er upgrades at its Oldham and Royton wastewater treatment works. the two works, which are located about 4km apart in north east Manchester, both require upgrades in order to meet new final effluent discharge consents and improve river water quality in the River Irk. SMEs picked for Scottish rural framework Nearly 60 small- to medium-sized (sME) contractors are to deliver scottish Water's new £3.5BN investment programme. the companies form a framework of rural contractors that can be used to support scottish Water and its partners in the delivery of construction and maintenance projects between now and 2021. Northumbrian awards sewer network deals Esh Construction and seymour (Civil Engineering Contactors) have been selected by Northumbrian Water to maintain its sewer network in the north-east. the frameworks, worth up to £247M over nine years, will see Esh and seymour carry out improvements and maintenance to nearly 30,000km of underground sewer pipes. construction of the super sewer. It will be chaired by Sir Neville Simms, with former Crossrail programme director Andy Mitchell as chief executive. The impact on customers' bills will be announced later in the summer once all of the contracts have been signed, but the maximum impact is estimated to be £70 to £80 per year. Under the terms of Ofwat's regulation of Bazalgette – which is named a"er the engineer behind London's sewers, Sir Joseph Bazalgette - 70 per cent of any underspend on the project would be returned to customers, with the infrastructure provider keeping the remainder. In the case of an overspend, customers would meet 60 per cent of this cost with the company paying for the remaining 40 per cent. The super sewer project has been designed to run 25km along the River Thames between Acton in the west and Abbey Mills in the east, and intercept 34 combined sewer overflows. It will divert surface water and sewage discharge to a wastewater treatment facility rather than allowing it to discharge directly into the river. From Abbey Mills it will join up with the Lee Tunnel, currently under construction by Thames Water. Along with the recently completed upgrade of five sewage treatment works on the tidal Thames (including at Beckton, East London), both the Lee Tunnel and the Thames Tideway Tunnel are needed to stem the 39 million tonnes of untreated sewage that overflow into the tidal river in a typical year from the capital's Victorian sewerage network. At the end of 2014, the project faced four legal challenges but the High Court rejected these in January this year. 7.8% The proportion of private water supplies that are contaminated with E.coli bacteria, according to the annual report of the Drinking Water Inspectorate. Amongst the smallest private supplies, the figure was even more alarming at 23%. AQUANAUT TRAINING: Specialist engineers at United Utilities are making a return journey into the 56-mile Haweswater Aqueduct to inspect the pipeline and carry out maintenance where required. The four- week project, which starts in late September, will be delivered by a team of 450 'aquanauts', who are preparing for the work at a bespoke training camp.

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