Tag: Cambridge Water

Eastern Region water companies planning for growth

We need to understand how much industry needs, and how much will it need in a hundred years; how much will agriculture need in a hundred years; what will the population be in a hundred years.

07:07 Wednesday 6th April 2016
BBC Radio Cambridgeshire

DOTTY MCLEOD: Water. We take it for granted. You turn on the tap. You go for a shower. You flush the loo. You water the garden. It’s always there. But we live in the driest part of the country, and we’re due to build many thousands more homes over the next couple of decades, full of people who will also want water. How to keep the taps running in the future was the question at an event in Peterborough organised by the watchdog, The Consumer Council for Water. Our reporter Katy Prickett went along.
RICHARD POWELL: We are the driest part of the country. Most of the Fens, as you know, is under sea level, so we could be flooded if there is an event. This part of the world has to look at the way it uses water, stores water, manages water, and this is incredibly important. We’re the fastest growing region outside London, so there are lots of houses, and businesses and jobs growth. They all need water. So water is an incredibly important part of the East of England, and how the companies manage that resource for the next fifty years is quite an important part of their role.
KATY PRICKETT: Richard Powell, a local customer advocate for the Consumer Council for Water, talking about water use in Cambridgeshire. The watchdog represents water company customers and was holding its first ever meeting in the Eastern Region at the Bull in Peterborough. It focused on efforts needed to protect water supplies for future generations. After all, Cambridge and South Cambridgeshire are scheduled to have a further 33,000 new homes by 2030, while just last week we heard Wisbech might be developed as a Garden Town with an extra 10,000 new homes, that will all want access to clean water. Bernard Crump is the watchdog’s Regional Chair for our area, and says customers are telling him they know water is a precious resource.
BERNARD CRUMP: With climate change, with growth in housing, and with the fact that this area is quite arid, expect to see water companies planning to make sure that the taps will always turn on, whatever comes along. We can act as the kind of bridge between that conversation we have with customers through our research and our contacts with them, and the companies, to make sure that that ambition to get the balance right is delivered.
KATY PRICKETT: During the lunch break he told me it’s all about supply and demand.
BERNARD CRUMP: In terms of supply, we need to make sure that we have the arrangements to store and to clean water in sufficient amounts to deal not just with the everyday, but within periods when we have a need to increase our use of water, because of weather, or because of drought or whatever that might be. And at the same time we need to look at ways that we can reduce demand for water, and that might be in our homes, it might be in areas of industry, agriculture being an important one we’ve been talking about, logical developments that can help crops to be able to give their yields with lower water dependency.
KATY PRICKETT: Water companies including Anglian Water and the Cambridge Water Company gave presentations at the meeting. Bernard Crump says he’s impressed by the way they’re collaborating with others to try to meet the rising demand for water in our area.
BERNARD CRUMP: That planning is standing us in good stead, so that when times get really tough with water towards the end of the 2020s, the planning has already been done to make sure that the solutions are in place. And you can rest assured we’ll be watching this area like a hawk over the next decade, to make sure that these plans get turned into reality.
DOTTY MCLEOD: Katy Prickett there, reporting from the Bull Hotel in Peterborough. Well listening to that is Emma Staples from Anglian Water. Morning Emma.
EMMA STAPLES: Morning Dotty.
DOTTY MCLEOD: I wonder if first of all you can just clear up a little bit of confusion for me. Because when I hear that gentleman saying Cambridgeshire is one of the driest parts of the country, but at the same time the Fens are nearly always flooded, what makes sense of that contradiction?
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Housing development and sustainable water supply in the Cambridge area

08:08 Tuesday 5th January 2016
BBC Radio Cambridgeshire

DOTTY MCLEOD: The headlines have been dominated by the devastation that flood waters have brought to the North of England over the last few weeks. Cambridgeshire has been spared the heavy rainfall this year, but one Cambridge academic has warned that instead of floods, the greatest challenge facing this county could be chronic water shortages in the coming years. Of course Cambridgeshire hasn’t always escaped flooding. In 1947 much of Fenland was inundated as rivers and drains broke their banks. These people remember what happened.
ONE: The Sunday night was very bad. Wind, the men had to rope themselves together on the banks to stop from falling into the river. Yes I were out on them banks and breaching them up with sandbags.
TWO: I went up to Earith because I’d heard rumours the bank had blown. When I got there it was really frightening. The bank was really shaking.
THREE: The one journey that I really recollect is the night that I was called out to go to Hilgay. The water in the river was so high that it was coming over.
DOTTY MCLEOD: There were also of course the terrible East Coast floods of 1953, when 300 people died, and as a result of that, a large scale flood protection scheme was introduced. Since then the flooding we’ve experienced in Cambridgeshire, although it’s always awful for anyone whose home is affected, it has normally been fairly localised. Dr Bob Evans is a Visiting Fellow at the Global Sustainability Unit at Anglia Ruskin University. Morning Bob.
BOB EVANS: Good morning.
DOTTY MCLEOD: Are we prepared then for the kind of deluge that we’ve seen in the North of England here in Cambridgeshire?
BOB EVANS: Well the North of England has had about three times its average rainfall in December. That is fairly rare.
DOTTY MCLEOD: Its average annual rainfall?
BOB EVANS: No no. Average for December.
DOTTY MCLEOD: OK.
BOB EVANS: So it’s an enormous amount of rainfall. We’ve had just over the average. So one of the reasons is we’ve had a lot less rainfall, and at the moment we’re coping. The river levels, I cross Jesus Green nearly every day and they’re not very up at all. And that’s been so for quite a long time.
DOTTY MCLEOD: Suppose we did have that kind of level of rain that they’ve seen in places like Cumbria, three times the average. Would we just be inundated here?
BOB EVANS: We would I think be more like what you’ve just been saying on the radio, that it would be local. Because it would be a question of how quickly you could shift the water through the system. And generally when we’ve had big floods it’s because the water can’t get out quickly, because the sluice at Denver is not allowing the water to go out to sea, because the tidal levels are very high. So you’d usually need two things to get really massive flooding. So I think you’ll just get local flooding, which as you say is fairly horrendous for the people who are affected. It won’t be massively around the Fens.
DOTTY MCLEOD: Now you say that actually water shortages are something that we’re more at risk of in the long term.
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Coping with Drought in the Fens

11:22 Monday 27th June 2011
Mid Morning Show
BBC Radio Cambridgeshire

PAUL STAINTON: How are we doing for water? Well let’s speak to Geoff Brighty, who’s from the Environment Agency .. Thank you for coming in. We had this massive period of dry weather, unprecedented almost. We’ve had a bit of rain. Now it’s absolutely boiling hot again. Where are we with water levels at the moment? Continue reading “Coping with Drought in the Fens”