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United Utilities (UU) is in the middle of a knowledge-sharing exercise with the New York Water Department as the two companies prepare for maintenance work on two of their major aqueducts.
Staff from UU have just returned from a visit to New York following a partnership struck up between the two water companies on how they will deal with taking water supply aqueducts offline for maintenance purposes.
The New York Water Department is starting its work preparing for maintenance work on its Catskill aqueduct, which supplies 40 per cent of Manhattan, and is seeking to learn from UU about how to handle the outage of the Haweswater aqueduct.
UU project manager for Haweswater John Butcher told Utility Week the key areas of knowledge-sharing have been around site security, construction site engineering, and resilience.
He said: “The principles remain the same in terms of operation in that they are gravity systems, and that they’ve been around for a long time and now need some TLC.
“This means taking them out of service and resilience is a big issue in New York as they have three pipelines that supply 9.5 million people.”
Butcher added that UU was “slightly ahead” in its resilience planning because it conducted the first shutdown of the aqueduct two years ago and has a wider variety of water sources and treatment works.
He said resilience planning was now taking place in New York, with lessons from UU on managing water supplies being applied.
Alongside this, the Americans are also keen to learn about what they may find when they inspect the Catskill aqueduct. “They are very keen to find out about our shutdown, what we did and what we found out when we went in for that first inspection,” Butcher said. “They are also keen to find out what our second inspection will find too as they may face some of the same issues.”
Staff from the New York Water Department are due to head to the UK for the second shutdown of the Haweswater aqueduct, scheduled for October, to gain further knowledge on how to operate a shutdown and how to develop resilient water supplies to cope with the aqueduct closure.
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