WINEP: Soil Engineering’s GI Supports AMP Suppliers
The UK’s Water Industry National Environment Plan, or WINEP, currently requires water companies to undertake over 24,000 actions related to water quality and biodiversity, supported by investment totalling over £22 billion. As well as headline projects such as United Utilities’ HARP, Southern Water’s Havant Thicket reservoir, Water Companies across England are undertaking numerous smaller improvement schemes to replace, upgrade and refresh their infrastructure to promote resilience, reliability and decrease environmental impact.
Soil Engineering has been providing high-quality Ground Investigation services to water companies and their contractors for decades, and have undertaken a wide range of projects in support of WINEP in just the last two years. Spanning a wide range of geological settings, geotechnical challenges, and project scope requirements, our flexible project teams and industry leading plant resource have proven vital in understanding ground and groundwater conditions at a number of WINEP projects.
WINEP across the South
Working with Costain, Soil Engineering has delivered projects both as core WINEP activities, and on the parallel WAAP (Wastewater Asset Assurance Programme) to support Thames Water in delivering key asset improvements. Over the course of 18 months and 23 projects the Soil Engineering GI South team delivered both utilities and topographic surveys, and follow-up intrusive works with subsequent monitoring rounds. Investing extensively in these surveys to support sustainable design and delivery of the final projects, Costain’s work scopes totalled over 120 boreholes, delivered by Soil Engineering’s expert drilling teams.
In the Midlands
Soil Engineering provided detailed ground investigation for Severn Trent’s “Coventry Green Recovery”. Whilst not directly part of the WINEP scheme, the supply infrastructure upgrade programme is aligned with the WINEP environmental goals but is an independent, region-specific initiative managed by Severn Trent as part of its wider “Green Recovery” programme. Contracted directly by Severn Trent under its Ground Investigation Framework, Soil Engineering completed twenty two boreholes across multiple contiguous packages of intrusive work supporting scheme design.
Better Rivers in The North
Working with United Utilities’ Principal Contractors JN Bentley and C2V+, Soil Engineering has undertaken nine projects associated with the Better Rivers initiative, also aligned with WINEP Objectives. Through the investment of £230M, United Utilities aim to reduce storm overflows, enhance waste water treatment, and improve river water quality. Soil Engineering’s work has encompassed investigations for new pipeline sections, and expansion, replacement or refurbishment of waste water treatment works. Including the completion of nine separate project sites, the projects continue to be managed by the GI North team, using locally based staff drillers wherever possible to minimise vehicle related carbon emissions. With Soil Engineering’s Major Projects team delivering extensive investigation works on the HARP project, our involvement in delivering investigations for WINEP aligned schemes has been almost continuous for the last five years.
The Soil Engineering Impact
Flexibility is key to delivering these multi-location suites of investigation work, built upon years of experience. Working for both Clients and Tier 1 Contactors we’re able to bring that experience to bear and optimise site activities to deliver the necessary design information.
