Issue link: https://fhpublishing.uberflip.com/i/796215
A t Lancaster substation, one half of a building that houses 33kV switchgear, gently humming, stands empty. Electricity North West (ENW) had doubled the building's size ready to install a modern circuit breaker. It would have replaced an older breaker in another building that was to be decommissioned. But the events of December 2015 le† that plan dead in the water. Storm Desmond hit Cumbria on 5 December 2015. Desmond was the fourth storm to be named under a Met Office pilot scheme intended to raise public awareness of extreme weather, and it brought gusts of up to 81 mph and record-breaking rainfall. One record set was for rainfall in a 48-hour period, when Thirlmere in the Lake District was deluged with 405mm of rain in just 38 hours. This was all bad news for ENW. Lancaster substation is the point where the local distribution network that covers the city of Lancaster meets the national transmission grid. It's in a vulnerable location. The small but significant site is on the banks of the River Lune, next to a molasses factory that contaminates the air with a pungent, sticky smell. On December 5 2015 the entire site disappeared under floodwater. The flood defences – which were three feet high – were breached, knocking out all three transformers and leaving 55,000 homes without power for two days. More than a year on, Network visited the site to meet ENW's operations director NETWORK / 18 / MARCH 2017 Martin Deehan. He told us why ENW was so unprepared for such an event, how its efforts to reconnect the city were only possible thanks to a multi-service approach and why an investment of £130 million is necessary to flood-proof the site for the future. Surprisingly, the floodwater that immersed the site was not the result of the river bursting its banks. Rather the site serves as the spill-off for a catchment area that includes all the regions of Cumbria hit by record-breaking rainfall. The water simply seeped up through the ground, leaving a bystander suddenly standing in a rapidly deepening foot of floodwater, Deehan says. Given the damage to the substation – the switchgear earmarked for replacement met its demise earlier than planned when it suffered an irrevocable fault – the residents le† in darkness could be forgiven for blaming ENW for being insufficiently prepared. Arguably it was, but through no fault of its own, according to Deehan. "All of our assets we had protected to Environment Agency (EA) guidelines. The intensity of Desmond was not predicted by the EA. Everybody in the country was taken in by the enormity of Desmond," he explains. "Unprecedented" was a word banded around a lot at the time, and it wasn't without merit. The substation had flood defences. The newly-extended building sits on three-foot- high foundations, while the older of the two buildings is surrounded by a wall built to the same height and is only accessible by climbing a steep set of steps. The vulnerable STORM RESILIENCE Lancaster substation • In 1922 Lancaster Corporation took over the power station built on the site on the banks of the River Lune on Caton Road during the First World War to supply electricity to the city of Lancaster and Morecambe. • Lancaster power station was demolished in the mid-1970s. • The high-voltage cables supplying different parts of the city still came together at Caton Road so this is where the city remained connected to the grid. • The substation consists of three 90MVA 132/33kV grid transformers. • The last major flood occurred 50 years ago when the water reached 1.5 metres above the current water level.