Water & Wastewater Treatment

www.wwtonline.co.uk | WWT | December 2013 | 5 Yorkshire Water makes major telemetry investment Yorkshire Water has announced that it is to invest £46M in renewing and improving telemetry equipment that helps control water distribution, quality and treatment across its region. The investment, spread over the next five years, will include the replacement of critical control systems that remotely manage much of Yorkshire's water infrastructure, such as the firm's 600 wastewater treatment works, 130 reservoirs and numerous storm water pumping stations. Nearly half of the money (£21M) will be spent on updating around 2,000 instruments that are used to measure water quality and control water flow to ensure regulatory standards are met. A further £18M will be spent on communication systems which relay key performance information from infrastructure assets to the company's head office in Bradford, while £7M more will be spent on site automation systems that run the firm's water treatment and distribution processes. Stephen Herndlhofer, Head of Information Services at Yorkshire Water, said: "We supply 1.2 billion litres of water and treat nearly one billion litres of wastewater each and every day. To ensure our assets and infrastructure continue to meet this demand, we monitor them every minute of every day, employing modern and reliable control systems. This requires an ongoing programme of upgrade and replacement to meet ever more stringent environmental and water quality standards. "By upgrading our telemetry equipment, it also reduces the risk of service failure by targeting maintenance and responding to failures before customers are affected. In turn, this helps us reduce operational costs and keep customers' bills low." Yorkshire Water will work with its telemetry partners, Grontmij and Capula, as well as other approved suppliers to replace and update its telemetry equipment. Since 2000, Yorkshire Water has more than tripled its annual investment in telemetry. Polluters pay SWW fined £214K for Plymouth pollution South West Water has been fined £214,000 by Plymouth crown court af- ter admitting breaching environmental controls at the Camels Head sewage treatment works in Plymouth and allowing sewage to pour into the River Tamar. The fine related to multiple breaches between March and Septem- ber 2013, when BOD and COD limits were exceeded. The judge criticised the "lack of urgency in addressing the assorted problems" at the Camels Head site. South West Water was fined £214,000 and made to pay costs of £27,750 in the case, brought by the Environment Agency. Greece penalised over UWWTD Greece has been fined 10M Euros by the European Court of Justice for not implementing an EU directive on urban wastewater treatment that was intended to be in full effect by the end of 2000. The court has also imposed a periodic fine of 3.64M Euros per semester of delay to implementing the Urban Wastewater Treatment Directive. The case follows an initial ruling by the court that Greece had failed on its obligations in a judgement in 2007. Oil firm fined for ship canal spill ESSAR Oil (UK) Limited, which operates Stanlow Oil Refinery in Ellesmere Port, has been fined £497,284 and made to pay costs of £40,000 in relation to two pollution incidents which occurred in 2012. In a case brought by the Environ- ment Agency, the firm was punished for the failure of the roof of an oil stor- age tank at Stanlow Oil Refinery which caused steam and oil to be released into the atmosphere in July 2012; and for a separate incident which saw five tonnes of oil enter the manchester Ship Canal in August 2012. The latter incident was blamed on the failure of ESSAR's effluent management system. VOX POP "We're seeing a reduction in the rates we're finding them [private pumping stations], so we think we've broken the back of it." Sam Oliver, programme manager, Severn Trent Water "We want to continue moving companies' focus away from the regulator onto building relationships with their customers." Ofwat chief executive Cathryn Ross "Rarely has there been such a singularly significant evolutionary step in wastewater treatment technology." Jim Palmer, Technical Director, EPS Group, on the Nereda process (see p17). Amendment to DWD gives more flexibility The Drinking Water Directive has been amended by the European Commission to give EU countries more flexibility about the way they monitor water quality and to enable a risk-based approach. The amended rules will remove "unnecessary burdens" in the current directive and allow states to take a more focused approach to monitoring, said the Commission. Under the revised rules, EU member countries can now decide, on the basis of a risk assessment, which parameters to monitor given that some drinking water supply zones do not pose any risk for finding hazardous substances. They can also choose to increase or reduce the frequency of sampling in water supply zones.

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