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24 | 15TH - 21ST SEPTEMBER 2017 | UTILITY WEEK Operations & Assets Steve Fraser, chief operating officer, United Utilities Q&A T he past few years have been a bumpy ride for United Utilities (UU). The cryptosporidium out- break, and subsequent boil water notice, which impacted 700,000 customers in Lancashire just over two years ago cast a long shadow. Storm Desmond, which hit UU's region over the winter of 2015/16, also impacted the company and region hard. Perhaps ironically, these incidents hit when UU was already in the midst of a programme to improve its resilience – a programme that is continuing today. While these events were painful for UU, chief operating officer Steve Fraser tells Utility Week they also provided the company with an opportunity to learn and improve. What have you learnt from, and changed in the wake of, the cryptosporidium incident in 2015? We been doing a lot of things in terms of system resil- ience and a huge amount of investment has gone into the system since them. Hopefully the regulators appreci- ate that and can see the improved performance. It was something that impacted customers but I hope they realise we took the right actions. We called it ourselves. The thing we're proud of is that we didn't take risks with customers' health. The learning from any incident is when the holes in the Swiss cheese line up, that's when you have a prob- lem. It focused the mind on making sure those holes can't line up in this company – and that's the work we've been doing on resilience. One of the areas we felt we could improve was with customers who were a bit more vulnerable than oth- ers. Customers who were ill, such as those who have immuno deficiency illnesses. You need to plan for the worst, and while we had done that for most of our customers, this was something we needed to do more of. We spoke with a lot of stakeholders and came up with this thing called priority services. What work has been done to improve water sup- ply resilience? "We are introducing the start-up-to-waste scheme. We have drinking water compliance in the high 99.9s but when you have three million customers, that 0.02 is still affecting people. It's about the chase to 100 per cent. When there are any issues on the plant – and they're highly technical things with lots of different stages – the plant is designed to close, which is great because deficient water is not going into supply. One of the issues we were having was get- ting plant started back up. It's very difficult for people to get them started back up on the eye of a needle in terms of water quality. So that's why we started looking at start-up-to-waste systems [where a tank stores the water and recycles it back into the treatment works aer start- up] because that means we won't have issues with water quality when restarting plants. What problems are being caused by the resilience drive? We're having some incidents in the network because we're doing so much to build resilience. We're having a big cleaning programme to clean our pipes, which means you're feeding people from different areas and diverting water in ways you wouldn't normally. You're creating a short-term issue to get a very good long-term gain. There is no way around that. Have you worked with external companies to develop a whole system-thinking approach? We have had external help. We share learning with Elec- tricity North West: we've been there and looked at what they do; they've been here. We also went down and did quite a bit of work with London Underground. Went to the control room at Canary Wharf and looked at how they do things there, which is interesting. The work they do there, the way they run and maintain the system. They can get track possession for about four hours a day, and now with the night tube, the maintenance is a nightmare. They have to be on the ball all the time. We've tried to understand how they take out and maintain pinch points in their system, similar to we've got in water. There are areas we've re-invented the wheel but there are also areas where we've taken learnings from others. Will UU's renewable agenda also boost your resil- ience? The past 18 months have been difficult because we had storm Desmond and Eva. Storm Desmond in particular took out a lot of local infrastructure. We were using a lot of power and not able to generate in those areas because assets were damaged. We're doing well this year, with 21-22 per cent self- generation and pushing that to 30s by the end of the AMP. With green gas, there is potential for more plants, which can be used on site or injected into the grid. Gas prices move around, so it could be more effective putting it into the grid, while sometimes it'd be more efficient using it ourselves, making it more cost-effective for us and our customers – who pay for it – to do it. United Utilities was already beefing up the resilience of its network – before storms Desmond and Eva came along to impress on the importance of the work.