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United Utilities (UU) has been forced to shelve plans for its maintenance project of the Haweswater Aqueduct after the cryptosporidium crisis left the scheme short staffed.
UU had to redeploy some of the 450 staff earmarked to work on the scheme to deal with the “major incident” which saw more than 300,000 customers being forced to boil their water.
The resolution of the cryptosporidium contamination crisis has come too late to see the project continue as originally planned, and UU has confirmed it has postponed it by 12 months just two weeks before work on the project was due to start.
Engineers were expected to attend a bespoke training camp before they could work on the 56-mile aqueduct from 21 September for the project.
A UU spokeswoman said: “The work will need doing at some point but won’t be going ahead this autumn. The outage has been postponed for a year.”
The head of civil engineering at contractor Land & Marine, Martin Oakes, said: “It’s a disappointment because it’s work we were geared up to do for the past six months and working with probably up to ten suppliers.
“The only communication we’ve had is to say it’s been postponed for 12 months.”
UU originally went underground to inspect Haweswater in 2013, training 80 carefully selected “aquanauts” who were assisted by 16 specialist Vehicle Access Systems. This was the first time since the pipeline was inspected since it was built 60 years ago.
A version of this story first appeared on wwtonline.
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