Quick-thinking water workers avert crisis

Aug 7 2008

A LEAK from a culvert threatened the water supply of 200,000 Lanarkshire homes.

The incident was revealed this week by Scottish Water.

They say that only the experience and quick thinking of their Lanarkshire Leakage Delivery and Operations Teams averted a major crisis to the supplies.

They used their expertise to find and fix a burst on the massive 27-inch trunk main delivering water to homes.

In order to locate the burst, which occurred in early July, engineers used the latest technical data and twice had to walk the line of the main - a total of 28 miles.

The leak was traced to a culvert running along the side of the A74, near Abington.

Leakage delivery team manager, Stewart Hamilton, admits it was a challenging three days for the newly-formed division.

He said: “We were first alerted to the burst when the high flow alarm went off. Around three million extra litres of water was disappearing from the Camps service reservoir, near Carstairs, and not rising to the surface. If it had, then it would have been a lot easier to detect.

“We dispatched three teams to locate the burst. Twice they walked 14 miles of the 36-mile pipeline in order to find the burst.

“We thought signs of the burst would show up in an old culvert running along the side of the road, and on the second occasion of looking we found it. Fixing it, however, was a different story. The main was located 26 feet underground.”

Water supplies to this part of Lanarkshire were diverted, with the Daer WTW (Water Treatment Works) serving the area directly.

The Camps and Daer mains are twinned so that if one bursts supply can be diverted to the other, keeping Lanarkshire in drinking water.

Customer operations team leader Willie Boyd, from Blantyre, has 26 years’ experience in the industry.

He said: “We called in the services of a robot camera to film at that depth in order to transmit the exact location of the burst back to our engineers on the ground. They carefully manoeuvred the CCTV unit along 90 metres of the pipeline before the burst was located.

“As anyone involved in construction will tell you, that depth of excavation isn’t easy.

“As we were digging down, the first hurdles we encountered were the crash barriers, central reservation and road gullies for the old motorway, which had been buried 14 feet below the current A74.”

Rob Mustard, Scottish Water’s regional manager for Lanarkshire, praised the team for their efforts in finding and fixing the burst. He said: “The Leakage Delivery Team and our Networks Operations Team are very experienced engineers, and this was among the most challenging leaks they’ve ever had to deal with.

"While they handle bursts and excavations on an almost daily basis, that level of dig certainly isn’t easy. It requires careful planning and execution.

“We have 14 squads finding and fixing bursts quickly and efficiently.

“As a business, we have increased our efforts and funding to tackle leakage and this is just one example of our determination to achieve our targets.”