Beast from the East 2: The big thaw

Following the cold weather this week with parts of the UK making headlines for the coldest temperatures recorded for 100 years, Utility Week catches up with network and leakage teams across the sector to hear how industry-wide improvements mean companies are ready for the big thaw this weekend when the cold weather breaks.

In 2018, the Beast from the East left homes without water supplies for days and saw the sector criticised for its preparedness and response to the extreme weather as well as the following thaw.

The criticisms largely related to keeping customers informed and there was a call to revise communication protocols across the sector – particularly to vulnerable and priority customers.

Severn Trent’s Paul Louth, network control business lead, told Utility Week the company learnt a lot over the past two years about responding to freeze thaw events and has updated its proactive and reactive responses to extreme weather.

“I’m going into this weekend feeling confident of the plans we have in place,” Louth says. “After the Beast from the East, we reviewed our preparation and response to the freeze thaw looking at everything from predicting, monitoring leakage, managing work in progress, staff levels and how to engage with customers.”

After Christmas, parts of Severn Trent’s region experienced a freeze thaw that caused a 350 per cent increase in burst mains, which Louth says were dealt with with little to no impact, showing the company is ready for the changing weather.

He says communicating to prepare people at home was essential to minimise in-home bursts and problems with pipes so the company vastly increased the number of emails and social media posts advising about lagging pipes.

“We had to be proactive this time around so looked at our stand-by resources such as having extra street engineers available, bolstered our call centres and control hubs to deliver end-to-end services,” he says.

In the run up to the milder weather this weekend, the company has focused on driving leakage levels down as low as possible. Louth says: “We’ve done everything we can to put teams in a better position beforehand to help when pipes inevitably burst.”

In the event of a burst, pipes depressurise and air gathers. Ordinarily hydrants can be opened but during a freeze thaw access can be more difficult, so air locks and valves have been replaced in preparation for this weekend. Louth explains it was a big problem in 2018 to get air out of the system, especially in parts of the regions that were hilly.

The company invested £6 million for an emergency fleet of 33 tankers with 50 people to crew them to inject emergency water supplies into a network that will get homes back on supply within hours of it being lost. In rural areas, bowser tanks are on standby to supply water to farms and industrial users that do not require drinking water standard supplies and SVT has encouraged winter preparation since the Beast from the East.

To address the criticisms over communication with customers, water companies have sought to use multiple channels and work with community groups to get the message out.

Ofwat chief executive Rachel Fletcher challenged water companies to collaborate on nationally significant events including freeze thaws, Brexit and latterly Covid-19. Coordinated by Water UK, they say they are now better positioned to share resources and help other companies as required. The trade body established an expert community to share best practice in planning for how freeze-thaw events could disrupt supply.

Helen Simonian, head of wholesale water at Southern, explains how they’ve adapted: “We completely reviewed our approach to supporting our customers during weather related events. As the weather looks set to get warmer over the next few days, we are contacting our domestic and business customers directly to put them on alert, offer advice to help them be prepared and make sure they know how to reach us in the event of an emergency, day or night.”

Changes have been made across the business aimed at mitigating risk and improving the response in the event of a repeat of 2018.

As well as the direct communications to customers, measures include strengthening the operational resilience, increasing asset resilience, enhancing reservoir storage and improving alternative water supply capabilities. Simonian says the company has an entirely new incident response process for all events and, despite the additional challenges of Covid-19, the teams are well adjusted to the new ways of working.

Jim Barker, head of water resources at Portsmouth, says the Beast from the East brought freeze thaws to front of the sector’s agenda. The company, which had the lowest leakage rates in England and Wales for 2019/20, has held pre-emergency team meetings for the past few days and will continue to meet over the weekend to ensure there are ample provisions of bottled water and that all staff are on standby.

“We always have lots of people ready 24/7 not just since the Beast from the East and there is even a second standby rota available all weekend.”

Barker explains the teams are fairly confident about maintaining leakage levels as the networks are in good shape and a lot of work has gone into preparing for cold snaps.

“We’ve invested a lot of money to understand and detect leaks and monitor the networks to have a lot more information in very real time that we did not have in 2018.”

Thames Water said of the 2018 incident that an estimated 70 per cent of pipe bursts were on customers’ properties so the company ramped up communications to get homeowners ready.

Kieran Ingram, Thames’ head of water networks, warns that business premises could be at risk if they’ve been unoccupied during the lockdown, meaning leaks could go unnoticed for several weeks. Thames issued tips for protecting homes and businesses and across its region and has extra leak repair teams on standby, including a night-time rapid response crew in London in case of large bursts.

The company has built up water reserves in its storage reservoirs and has alternative supplies in place in case of any disruption. Compared to 2018, supplies of bottled water have more than tripled and stock holdings of pumps, barriers and sandbags have also increased. Thames has grown its pool of HGV drivers to deliver bottled water and also clean and wastewater tankers from 50 to 130.

Since the start of winter, Affinity Water has been pushing the message to householders to protect their pipes by ensuring they are insulated and being mindful to keep heating on even if a property is empty for a few days.

Anglian says it has developed and rolled-out a self-serve platform for customers since the Beast from the East that allows people to raise a job without needing to call, which means the company can handle more contacts than before. Customers can instantly log issues via an online form so reduces the need for being on hold at busy times.

As well as increasing access to alternative water supplies, Anglian prepared by developing an incident response notification and information tool and has introduced an over the phone triage service to help householders fix problems without needing a technician’s visit.

Like Portsmouth, the company has daily ops calls to manage workloads and forecast and anticipate necessary responses to triggers.  As the weather warms, the company expects ground movement and has incident response teams ready.

Martin Lunn, head of service water planning at Northumbrian says the company came through the Beast from the East “relatively unscathed” thanks to preparations, which it has now repeated.

Lunn explains teams maximised storage at treatment facilities ahead of the thaw and focused leakage efforts on unoccupied commercial properties. Northumbrian’s leakage levels have been affected by a series of “mini-Beasts from the East”, Lunns says, which also caused bursts for customers.

“As the thaw starts to happen, we will be ready. We have already put in place additional people-power, with more of our people on stand-by. We are also preparing by keeping our storage as high as we possibly can. Unfortunately, bursts are something that we can only be so prepared for, and a lot of the work that our people carry out is reactive depending on the situation.”

The teams have upped their communications and work with the National Farmers Union, Tourist Boards and local Chambers of Commerce to target them with clear, timely information.

He notes holiday homes and unoccupied small businesses as an area for concern during lockdown so the company targeted these customer groups to protect their properties.