environment

Ingeokring Newsletter
Figure 2 Layout plan from Binnie and Partners 1973 of the proposed River Tame Purification Scheme with shaded area
showing future Kingsbury Water Park. Note North is from left to right Figure 1a and 1b area and Stineware Limited in
white dotted area
power stations and furnaces where once, I presume,
Archer-type farms used to be. Ham Hall Power Station
is located on a site, which had an historic house that
was destroyed in the war. Nearby Tamworth was even
more dilapidated and required more creative imagination
to see the town restored to former glory. At Tamworth
the Reliant car factory produced the three wheeler car,
the ‘Robin’. So far my colleagues were correct. I did get
a brand new Land Rover to cover the large area that we
were to investigate. If I was not going from one driller to
another I was looking for petrol stations willing to sell
me fuel. It was crisis in the UK. The oil sheiks had turned
on the screws and half of England was on strike so fuel
was hard to get. Environmental awareness was coming
hard and fast: rationing of petrol meant care had to be
taken not to make unnecessary trips. Make do with less
and waste less. And here in England’s heart it looked
like the country was indeed dieing from heart seizure
bought about by lungs and arteries clogged with
nicotine, striking workers and fuel shortages.
The start of the project is a small village called Lea
Marston where a rural stone arched bridge crosses the
River Tame and that the river starts to look like a river
except: beneath the bridge one has a good view of a
fairly fast flowing dark grey murky fluid which to some
may still be water. The object is to have the water flow
into lakes, allow the grey silt containing PCBs, heavy
metals, organics material etc. to settle. A mud-cat
(suction dredger) would slurp the material from the
lakebeds and then pump the slurry to a treatment works
by turning the ‘sludge’ into solids for burning or
disposal. This process had already been tried on the
Ruhr river in Germany. If one looks at a publication by
Woods (1984) one can see that the River Tame was
even dirtier than the Ruhr (see Table 1).
Table 1: Comparison between sediments collected
from experimental lakes at Elford and Lea Marston
and lakes on the River Ruhr (Woods, 1984)
My focus at the time was to carry out boreholes to
investigate the deposits along the banks of the river
where new artificial lakes would be created in the rather
flat valley of between Lea Marston and Dosthill to the
north. The lakes would be formed partly from existing
reworked gravel pits and new gravel pits. The idea is
that the first lake, at Lea Marston would trap the bulk of
the effluent in the water. The water would then pass
over aeration weirs situated between the lakes. The
whole Lakeland area would also become a nature/
recreation reserve. Binnie and Partners (the ‘Engineers’
for the project and my employer had a number of
engineers from Cambridge and Oxford who were keen
on rowing and they were trying their best to fit in a
proper full-length rowing course but could not succeed.
The boreholes had to be instrumented with standpipes
so eventually part of my routine was to make daily
ground water measurements and to see if they fluctuated
with the river levels (they did).
Much of the investigation was for a pipeline to the village
of Dosthill. (Dosthill resembled a rather forlorn and
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