Thames Tideway Tunnel super sewer completed
bbc.com
bbc.com
>"We have had our challenges. It's absolutely fair to say that." Tessa Fayers, Thames Water's operations director for Thames Valley and Home Counties, told BBC News.
> "But I think one of the things if you go back in our heritage back to the 1800s Thames Water is phenomenal at delivering infrastructure solutions that provide fantastic sanitation services to the city of London."
Throughout their history, their predecessors were not private companies, but from '74 until 89, they were at least a regional water authority. This is a hilarious thing for someone to have said, especially within the corporation.
To go further, from Wikipedia:
> The company has been criticised for paying substantial dividends to shareholders while simultaneously taking out loans, accumulating £14 billion in debts. In June 2023, Thames Water was reported to be close to financial collapse; while it secured £750m from shareholders in July 2023, the company warned it would need a further £2.5bn from investors by 2030.
It's almost like most of their problems are as a result of that privatization, even... wow.
By modern standards that seems extremely well-costed! What's £800m / 16% these days?
Rivers/sewage is a hot-topic in England at the moment as the water companies are trying to manufacture consent; trying to get bailouts and/or permission to massively raise prices to fix issues they neglected over many years in order to make shareholders happy (yes, water is fully privatised in England, naturally...though I'm not sure if Scotland (where it's publicly owned) is faring any better when it comes to sewage dumping?)
Perhaps it was more expensive to modernise the sewage system and separate sewage from rain water, but what they done here does not fix the problem it just patches it so it's not a problem for now.
"It's cheaper to let someone else deal with this later" is not a good reason to not do something today. Why should later generations have to deal with this problem? What if they decide its their grandkids problem?
I'm sure there was a long debate on the pros and cons of different approaches here. I'm sure it's just the way the article is written, but either way it's annoying that we seem to lack the ambition to build things that last and that we can hand to our grandkids with pride.
In Portland, we did similar combined sewer pipe. But they didn't size it to handle the largest rainfall. The sewers still overflow a couple of times a year, but it is much better than dozens of times. Especially since it now only happens in the winter when no one is using the river. It would have cost a lot more to handle peak rainfall. It is already expensive, sewer costs twice as much as water here.
Portland has also been working on the “next steps” pointed out in this article. Street bioswales provide absorption and holding capacity. Downspout disconnection programs and new build codes drain rooftop rain locally on the property or out to the street instead of directly in to the sewers.
I think we have an easier time due to our lower density. Most lots have decent amount of exposed ground for rain infiltration, and the area has well draining soil. Tougher for cities more tight and built up. I think Seattle codified water management before the latest building boom so hopefully they will do alright too!
Is that really the cheapest way to make a storage reservoir? Wouldn't it have been cheaper to have a regular size pipe, and some big tank at the end?
Whereas if you say "it's a big pipe to take sewage away", nobody can object to that. Everyone wants their sewage taken away.
The fact the pipe is also acting as a reservoir becomes a technical detail.
You'd dig up a few acres of park and put it underneath.
> "You could use nature to be dealing with this. You could have lots of areas that would soak up the rain rather than rush it off the streets and rush it off the roofs straight into the sewers."
Berkeley's started building bioswales* in several places to better manage stormwater. It makes a lot of sense and is also a big aesthetic improvement - instead of a concrete gully, you've got a nice green patch and some happy plants.
Water management is definitely something we're going to have to get better at. Letting the free water that falls from the sky dump straight into the sewer system is very much a mid-20th-century everything's-infinite-why-worry type approach.
Can someone define what's meant here by "raw sewage" please? Are we talking about wastewater from toilets?
I'll give you one guess if I'm a local or not!
https://news.sky.com/story/down-the-drain-what-went-wrong-wi...
I think I'd almost prefer houses in Britain to not have toilets at all (require the use of portaloos) than to have toilets that drain into the river.
Next up the Potomac River Tunnel in the northwest, a 19 foot 6.5 mile pipe. https://www.dcwater.com/projects/potomac-river-tunnel-projec...
I forget the exact backstory but the EPA got some kind of judgement I guess in 2005 that we couldn't let the combined sewer run off overflow run into the river. This has been our response to that. Work was underway in NEbut took till 2016 to figure out the whole plan, https://www.dcwater.com/about-dc-water/media/news/dc-agreeme...
DC's tunnels are "only" 100ft down. These Chicago tunnels seem much deeper! We also don't seem to have the vast reservoirs Chicago is adding; our tunnels are our storage.
Maybe what went wrong is that they read the internal diameter of the tunnel (7.2m) and compared with the width of a bus (~2.5m for a New Routemaster) and forgot that busses are not 2 dimensional line segments.
And if you're worried about mosquitos that what underground reservoirs and BTI is for. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacillus_thuringiensis_israele...
But really, rain barrels, storage tanks, cisterns, rain gardens, permeable concrete, tiny ponds. Rain is a blessing you don't appreciate until you don't have it, and we should do more to deal with its destructive effects than just drain it to somewhere else.
Edit: I love these, they're pits in the clay filled with organic soil. https://www.thefoodscaper.com/blog/how-to-manage-rainwater-r...
London's aging sewer network (an engineering marvel at the time it was built) has needed this upgrade for a while. For the dual reason of population growth but also the vast amount of water that we get when it rains is causing overflows into the river.
One thing Britain isn't short of is water; and it looks likely to get worse with the adverse weather events that are seemingly more frequent now. Most predications are that Britain will get wetter because of climate change.
Exact same thing is happening in the midwest of the US, where the green belt is heading east and dropping more water in less time on less area.
Its not just "a few rain barrels" its literally every single property and every single development being upgraded and designed to capture and store water and let it seep into the soil before overflowing into the sewer.
Not only does it make a better place to live as you generally need plants to use that water, but its the only way to capture it at scale. I live in a swamp, and right now is the time of what I call "the big slurp" where all the plants turn green, and the high water from winter that has the water table at ground level will drop 6 inches as every plant turns into a straw. It happens over 3-4 days and its wild to see.
A bigger and bigger sewer is the "just one more lane" to fix traffic congestion. It doesn't work, definitely not as a singular solution. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/dec/28/chinas-sponge-...
I understand that Thames Water may get powers to charge people (eg homeowners) a fee who have flouted regulations such as SuDS by making their surfaces impermeable and thus added to the problem, eg concreted over their front garden.
At the same time this can be very hard to retrofit. Having a lawn instead of a concrete pad is only a small part, you need areas that you are willing to allow to flood in a rain event. London wasn't built with this in mind, so any significant improvement that would make improvements to the sewer system unnecessary take way too long.
Britain as a whole gets quite a lot of rain but it is not equally distributed [0]. Basically the western side and mountainous areas get the most (>2000mm per year) while the south east gets much less (600-700 mm per year). There is no 'national grid' for water (mechanisms for bulk movement from the wet to the dry areas). Even though the population has increased a lot there hasn't been a significant new reservoir built for decades. The south east regularly has hosepipe bans in the summer. Vast amounts are lost through leakage from the very old infrastructure, while the relatively newly privatised water companies have taken on massive debts in the process of generating shareholder value, rather than fixing things.
[0] https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/weather/learn-about/weather/typ...
For people who don't understand the problem the tideway addresses, it's not like we just pump sewage into the river, it's that when there is a lot of rain the sewers can flood with runoff and can flood into the river.
[1] https://en-gb.topographic-map.com/map-kffs8/London/?center=5...
[2] Which is an engineering marvel and quite beautiful in my opinion. A boat trip up to see it is well worthwhile during a visit for people who want to do things that are a little unusual https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thames_Barrier