Water & Wastewater Treatment Magazine
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www.wwtonline.co.uk | WWT | OcTOber 2017 | 17 resilience means to customers, and that can be achieved in a number of ways. It may be about interconnectivity – in pipework for example - so that there is extra capacity in systems that provide service to customers. It might also be through heavily deploying techniques such as LEAN plant manufacturing, where you optimise to perfection all of your manufacturing assets, treatment assets, in order to be able to create capacity and therefore resilience in those systems. "Resilience is about the ability to resist, being able to cope in circumstances like big floods and big droughts and continuing to provide customer service; but 'how resilient?' is a question that now features quite high up on the list of importance." Resilient drainage Alongside its big investments in sewer infrastructure – the Tideway Tunnel being the most obvious example - this AMP period has also seen Thames carry out a • Lawrence Gosden, Thames Water ● Lawrence Gosden has been the managing director of Thames Water's wholesale wastewater business since June 2014, when this division was created amid the separation of Thames's wholesale and retail operations. ● He has been at Thames a decade, having joined in October 2007, originally serving as Head of Capital Delivery and latterly as Asset Director. Earlier in his career he held senior posts at Southern Water and South East Water. ● At Thames, he is responsible for overseeing the collection and treatment of 4.2 billion litres of wastewater every day across its 350 sewage works and its vast network of sewers, and the creation of enough energy to run a city the size of Oxford. ● In the five years to 2015, Gosden played a central role in shaping a £5BN capital investment programme which included the Lee Tunnel and the Thames Tideway sewage treatment works improvements. He also helped create the Eight2O Alliance which delivers Thames' large capital projects pilot project which has seen sustainable urban drainage systems (SuDS) retrofit- ted in three areas of London. Gosden says that SuDS has a big part to play in reducing the load on London's sewers go- ing forward, although he stresses that it is most effective in helping deal with low to medium levels of rainfall. By contrast, it is heavy, sudden rainfall that can be most problematic for flooding risk. "Whether you are a climate change believer or not, the reality that I'm seeing as a wastewater leader is more frequent, heavier flash flooding style storms in summertime," says Gosden. "In fact, over the last few years, summertime has been more difficult to handle operationally, because of flash flooding storms, than the winter time which would traditionally have been more of a focus. The volumes can be enormous in a short space of time, and that's where you need large infrastructure that's going to move that away smartly and help get things back to normal." London needs its own resilience strategy, according to Thames Water's Lawrence Gosden resilience is about more than large infrastructure, such as the Thames Tideway Tunnel AMP7 is also likely to see Thames and other water companies ramp up work on preventing sewer blockages. Around 80% of blockages can be attributed to customer behaviour, with fats, oil and grease let loose into drains and wet wipes and other items flushed down toilets. 'Fatbergs' are back in the news – Thames's recent discovery of its biggest ever Whitechapel fatberg made the headlines on the BBC Today programme – and the water company is set to put further resources into its 'Bin it, don't Block It' campaign. "We've deployed a whole range of engagement techniques with our customers on this, and we've found we've had the most success when it's targeted," he says. "We've analysed all the risks and used big data techniques to layer all the different data sources: blockage data, usage data, data on the pipework and the configuration of the network. When you put those together it gives you a picture of where your key areas of focus are, and we've really targeted those