The UK’s drainage system is largely old, unmaintained and doesn’t have the capacity for the more frequent high intensity weather events we are now having.
Drainage systems are typically designed today with a capacity for 1:100 year i.e. you will only see this amount of rainfall once in 100 years, weather events with an allowance for Climate Change.
A number of issues in the UK.
a) Much of the older drainage systems are a combined foul and surface water system. 1 pipe carries sewage and water running off roofs and roads etc. Modern systems try to avoid this now.
b) simple lack of capacity and increased use.
c) Lack of maintenance
d) We are now seeing those 1:100 events far more often than we should be.
e) Older systems were not designed for the rate of growth, greater intensity and of course climate change.
I get involved in a lot of collapsed sewer repairs and the mix in systems you get is immense and repairs are often extremely complex
This is fucking maddening. Same in Bangladesh too. Imagine the amount of fresh water being wasted while we are emptying the subsurface aquafers to meet our needs.
There is so little fresh water it amazes me that we haven’t implimented systems to help ‘stock’ it ‘properly’ or a least facilitate it. No we do the opposite with silly irragation systems that only take into account taking fresh water away from one area to dump it in another.
seperate sewer and stormy inverts here in Oz which is the way to go.
i do wonder out loud though if mixing the drainage systems assists in recycling waste product.
not that id imagine it is best practice, but given the age of the infrastructure, i can imagine that just seperating the two waste systems isnt as simple as laying two seperate drains.
you might have to start by ensuring enough fresh water is pumped into the sewer systems to assist flow at the treatment plants.
In dry conditions maybe. In peak flows it’s a nightmare. The plants can’t cope with the volume so it just gets discharged straight into the river untreated.
Welsh water were fined last year for letting too much through. They are not alone.
Separate systems are the way to go with measures that collect surface water and put it in the ground. Putting sufficient slope on the pipes is the way to prevent blockages etc.
Partly but also age. Old systems can be anything including clay pipes, cast iron pipes, and brick culverts of all sorts of shapes and sizes. Simple lack of maintenance is the big issue but in reality many of these realistically cant be maintained. I’ve come a cross a couple of collapsed sewer problems where the problem has occurred in a location that makes repair incredibly complex. They end up pumping the sewer out for lengthy periods while all the details are sorted.
new systems encounter all sorts of problems and design challenges. Sometimes its really difficult to get a decent fall on your new pipe into the existing one, not enough capacity or it’s uphill even. Poor ground for surface water is another typical one. In Wales you are forced to try an put a soakaway system in the ground to allow surface water to filter into the ground. Sometimes you are forced to provide attenuation, storage tanks basically that will store surface or foul water to provide time for the stuff to get down the pipe at its capacity. Pumping stations are another along with permeable paving to off road areas - car parks, drive ways, play areas etc.
As far as the planning legislation goes I think we have it about right. Developers hate it, we hate it because the developers hate it and there often isn’t enough people on the planning approval side to get a timely answer to things but I think the idea is right.
But as with many things on the infrastructure side the UK is decades behind on its maintenance needs. Not only with drainage, all things infrastructure.
I’m in Asset Management for the Highways department of a London borough, and we’ve been getting hammered with these two recent rainfall events. We have a fairly robust operational maintenance regime with our crit gullies very regularly cleaned and checked, but even adding extra gullies at sag points or regular cleaning isnt going to prepare you for the rainfall events with we are seeing now.
Here in the UK its not just remote places that lack charging points.
For example our nearest motorway service station on the M6 (Charnock Richard), has six charging points, three on the northbound carriageway and three south. When I checked this morning only three (one north, two south) were in service.
There are more charging points at a nearby hotel (12), but they are exclusively for Tesla vehicles.
Heading south on the M6, the next service station with southbound access (Sandbach), has only four charging points (two north, two south). Only one charging point in each direction is currently in service.
The same applies to the next service station with southbound access (Keele); four charging points, two north, two south, only one in each direction in service.
If I planned to drive north to Glasgow by motorway, a journey just over 200 miles, there are a grand total of 19 charging points at motorway service stations along the way, only 11 of which are fully operational as of this morning.
The government have announced plans to invest £1 billion in additional charging points on the Motorway/A road network, but that will only come into effect in 2023.
In the meantime, anyone planning on a “long distance” road trip by electric car would be well advised to plan for a protracted journey and to take sufficient victuals and perhaps a change of clothing for the expedition.
Right. My point was that the objections can now no longer really be made on a performance basis. The issues that still need to be solved for them to become the default options are cost and convenience, the latter being because our infrastructure is still geared to combustion engines. Furthermore, I don’t know there are good solutions to the issue faced with trips longer than the max distance of the charge. It’s one thing to have charging stations replace every petrol pump so that you always know where to get a charge. But that is not a 1-1 solution if to go from near empty to fully charged it takes an hour.
I suspect that many people like myself are waiting for prices to fall to a level more in line with conventional petrol/diesel vehicles before taking the plunge.
My reticence is due not only to the current price premium, but also the fear that should prices plummet dramatically in the future, it would significantly reduce the residual value of the vehicle in the resale market. A double incentive not to be a pioneer.
And although the lack of public charging points will probably constrain long range journeys by electric vehicles, as the average car journey distance in the UK is about 10 miles, provided you have access to a home charging point, the lack of public facilities won’t be much of an issue.
That said, only 65% of UK households have sufficient off-street parking space for a car or a van; consequently it will be difficult, if not impossible for 35% of UK households to have their own dedicated, private charging facility.
My gut says we’re too late now. From a Climate perspective COVID was an opportunity to review and make changes given the massive world wide shut down. We’ve ignored that chance because of politics.
From @Bekloppt’s article above there was also a link to this.
This is what I have been fearing since the eighties when I 1st delved into climate change. The consequences are so diverse, complicated and devastating that it’s incomprehensible.
You know how bad things really are when american conservative have progressed from the “it isnt real”, quickly through “sure, it’s real, but we dont really know we’re causing it”, to land firmly in the “we’ll, not much we can do about this now.”
Yeah, we’ll feel the irresponsibility of multinational companies and politicians for many decades to come. The question is however if things continue in business as usual style for a while yet, we are at risk of a massive catastrophe threatening our very lives, and the survival of our and so many other species.
That can still be avoided. But loons like Bolsonaro for instance must be really taken to task. There are far too many of his ilk in key positions. They won’t do shit, for diverse reasons, corruption being one of them.
At the end of the day, short-sightedness is the key word here. Far too many short-sighted in power, both at political and economical level. They think about themselves, the clients who have put them into power, and about some short-term issues for their countries or companies. But they don’t see / don’t want to see the full picture.
