Aqueducts & Large Diameter Trunk Mains Clean & Maintain ...

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Category
Winner
Programme of the Year 2010
Aqueducts and Large Diameter Trunk Mains Clean
& Maintain Programme, United Utilities
Sponsor
Overview
Cleaning and maintenance programmes don’t come much
bigger than the five-year, £143 million asset-management
project of United Utilities (UU).
UU provides water and wastewater services to over
seven million people, 200,000 businesses and key
account customers, including motor manufacturers, food
producers, oil refineries and chemical producers, across
the north west of England.
The company supplies around 1,900 million litres of
treated water to its customers through a vast 42,000
kilometre pipe network every day. It is essential that this
strategic infrastructure is properly maintained to ensure
that customers are provided with clean, safe, reliable
drinking water supplies 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
Failure to maintain this system can have a significant impact
on business performance from both a regulatory and
customer perspective in terms of financial penalties, levels
of service and reputational impact.
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APM Project Management Awards
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Objectives
As part of an asset management plan from 2005 – 2010,
UU invested £3.1 billion in a wide range of asset and
infrastructure improvements through a number of targeted
capital investment programmes. The aqueducts and
large diameter trunk mains (LDTM) clean and maintain
programme was part of this and had two main objectives:
1. To plan, design, develop and implement a major
programme of inspection, maintenance and repairs on
UU’s two main aqueducts, the Haweswater (HA) and
the Thirlmere (TA), and associated infrastructure, which
transfer water from the Lake District through to areas of
Cumbria, Lancashire and Manchester.
2. To clean and refurbish six LDTMs reducing levels of
levels of iron and manganese, which are harmless but
can discolour the water supplied to customers.
Resources
The project included the largest-scale cleaning work ever
undertaken in the UK water industry. Over £143 million
was invested across more than 30 co-related projects over
a five-year period.
Up to 100 people worked in the TA at any one time,
presenting a huge exercise in logistics, resource and health
and safety planning.
The LDTM projects were delivered using project
manager led project centric teams comprising members
from three organisations, UU and strategic partners
Balfour Beatty Utility Solutions and Montgomery Watson
Harza. The team members were drawn from cross
business resource pools of specialist skills, including
co-located project management, co-ordination, control,
design, health, safety and environmental teams to ensure
efficiency and effectiveness through open communication.
Due to the high risk, high profile nature of this programme
a governance board was established. This provided an
opportunity for reporting the programme and its co-related
projects status, managing senior management expectations
and allowed risks and issues to be escalated to the correct
level within the organisation quickly and efficiently.
Challenges
The programme had one major constraint – the works
could not affect supplies to customers. This meant a fresh
approach to project prioritisation, resource planning, risk
management, integration and scheduling.
Other challenges were that the majority of these
strategically important assets were over 50 years old (and
in some cases over 100 years old) and had never been
taken out of service for significant maintenance before, and
the nature, scale and uncertainty of unforeseen events,
such as extremes of weather, major bursts, and third party
damage, and issues that required reactive maintenance put
pressure on the overall annual budget and caused project
priorities to be frequently re-assessed.
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APM Project Management Awards
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Co-ordination
Due to the scale of inspection and maintenance work
required and the need to avoid disrupting customers’
supplies, the aqueduct maintenance and LDTM cleaning
projects were carried out in phases over a five-year period.
Work on the two aqueducts – the Thirlmere one being
more than 115 years old – included investigation, survey
and structural repairs. Targeted repairs were carried out
along the entire 134-kilometre length of the TA, but the
aqueduct could only be taken out of service for one month
each autumn.
Cleaning of the LDTM’s also required complex planning
and execution. For instance, the first mains - supplying
more than 1.7 million customers – required two 25
kilometre mains to be cleaned that were large enough
for an adult to walk through. Access was necessary at
more than 80 locations, requiring substantial third-party
negotiations and more than 15 kilometres of access track.
Only one main could be out of service at any one time and
cleaning work was restricted to the autumn/winter period.
It was also vital that nearby mains were not affected or
damaged to ensure customer supplies were maintained.
Comprehensive contingency plans were required for each
scheme to ensure that assets could be repaired or returned
to service quickly should an incident or emergency occur
within the regional system.
Innovative approaches and techniques also had to be
developed to scale up existing technologies to meet the
demands of the programme and generate cost efficiencies.
Specialist equipment was developed, including a CCTV
device that was floated through the live systems to identify
areas of concern requiring further investigation and low
ground pressure vehicles allowing jetting and removal of
wash water from up to 1km of LDTM.
Successes
£8 million efficiency savings.
Improved customer service standards.
Better water quality.
Reduced health and safety risk to employees and third
parties by upgraded access.
Improved structural integrity of the aqueducts.
Improved regional network response to incidents such
as bursts, with faster diversions, and altered flow rates
to minimise water loss and maintain customer supplies
without major discolouration.
Delivered with no lost time accidents and no significant
impact on customer levels of service.
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APM Project Management Awards
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