Britain has been in the grip of an “unparalleled national crisis,” according to major general Patrick Sanders, the assistant chief of defence staff. As the floods and storms that have battered the nation since Christmas come to a tentative halt, water and power companies are left counting the cost and asking, is this the new normal?
January was England’s wettest winter month in almost 250 years, with 146.9mm of rain. As storm after storm raged, hundreds of thousands of customers lost power – 400,000 WPD customers were cut off last week alone as a result of two violent storms, which saw wind gusts reaching 100 mph.
The extreme weather has been blamed on climate change, and further incidences are expected. Utilities have coped well with the latest weather events, with WPD restoring power to all customers within the guaranteed standard times specified by Ofgem, with no major disruptions to water supply. Over the Christmas period alone, 750,000 customers lost power supplies, with some areas of the network experiencing as many faults in five days as would normally be seen in two months.
Despite this, networks managed to reconnect 93-95 per cent of customers within 24 hours. Indeed, this confidence seems to be backed up in the figures, with Severn Trent and South West Water playing down the financial effects of flooding in their interim statements last week. The former claimed the flooding had “no material financial impact” on its finances.
Supply disruptions have been “winter business as usual”, according to trade body Water UK, with a “few hundred” people across the UK affected so far, and typically for just a few hours.
But experts warn that resources will come under increasing strain in any further cases of extreme weather. Shadow energy minister Tom Greatrex told Utility Week: “Companies have grown increasingly capable in dealing with extreme weather events, but there remain questions to be asked. Current policies, which involve pooling rapid response resources between companies and regions, leave the system exposed to shocks which strike more than one region.
“As Ed Miliband has made clear, storms of this nature are likely to become increasingly common as a result of climate change. Companies and governments need to be increasingly vigilant and ensure that substations, power stations and other parts of our vital power infrastructure are protected ahead of time against such events.”
The prolonged and widespread rainfall that the country has seen in the past few weeks could be just the start. The Met Office has highlighted a number of recent studies, including one from the International Journal of Climatology, which provides evidence that rainfall is increasing in intensity. Supporting this, figures from the Met Office show that while in the 1960s and 1970s, extreme rainfall could be expected once every 125 days, now the frequency is once every 85 days.
The effects could be devastating: should a major treatment works flood, hundreds of thousands of customers could be cut off, increasing costs dramatically.
This is what happened in 2007 at Severn Trent’s Mythe water treatment works in Tewkesbury. Its closure left 350,000 customers without tap water for more than two weeks.
Severn Trent is confident there will be no recurrence, having dismantled a disused railway embankment alongside the treatment works, and invested £38 million in a number of projects to improve the resilience of Gloucestershire’s water supplies since the floods of 2007.
However, there has already been a close shave at Sutton and East Surrey’s Kenley Water Treatment Works, with the prospect of a shutdown “touch and go” at one point earlier this month. South West Water’s region has also been hit hard, with the company confirming that prolonged and persistent heavy rainfall is causing groundwater levels to rise, leading to sewer flooding. This has spurred it to commit to invest £4.4 million to protect customers from sewer flooding in at-risk places, while Thames Water is having a tough time of it too, supplying water to one of the worst hit areas in the country.
According to Water UK, in the next five years, companies will spend £25 billion on a range of different measures suited to their regions, to ensure resilient water and sewage systems.
Power companies will have to invest too. UKPN alone, which covers London, the South East and East of England, has paid almost £3 million to customers who were without power during the St Jude and December storms.
The network industry is still coming to terms with the scale of the damage and its costs, and with a government-mandated review due to report in April, things should become clearer this spring.
A UKPN spokesperson said: “Only when the weather settles into a more predictable pattern will we be able to fully assess the costs.”
There’s the rub: might predictable patterns be a thing of the past?
EYE OF THE STORM
Severn Trent
A number of Severn Trent customers were left without water last weekend as the company faced a series of weather-related disruptions, including water supplies in Worcester and Gloucestershire downed by power failures. Emergency generators were set up and pumps deployed in Worcester, Bewdley, Shrewsbury and Ironbridge.
WPD
150,000 Western Power Distribution customers across the South West, south Wales and the Midlands had to be reconnected last weekend as the regions were battered by high wind, damaging power lines. Engineers were hampered by winds gusting at 100mph and restricted access to roads and bridges due to fallen trees and flooding.
SES
116,000 Sutton and East Surrey Water customers came close losing their water supplies as the Kenley Water Treatment Works narrowly escaped a forced closure after flooding threatened to overwhelm it last week. Employees worked “24 hours a day” deploying sandbags and other defences, while pumps were installed to take water away from the site.
UKPN
More than 370,000 UK Power Networks customers were affected by last weekend’s storm. The network drafted in extra front line and back office staff to cope with all the power interruptions and “the vast majority” of properties were back on supply within 12 hours.
Southern Water
Southern Water is spending is spending an extra £100,000 a day to keep its sewers working, as the South East experiences the worst series of storms in more than ten years. The water company has a fleet of tankers as well as mobile pumps working round the clock throughout key points in the region.
What’s the plan?
It has emerged this week that building on flood plains has played a role in the widespread devastation.
• 200,000 homes were built on flood plain between 2001 and 2011
• Planning authorities have no legal obligation to consult the Environment Agency or water companies, or to follow their advice if they do consult them
Political weather
by Mathew Beech
People may have responded to the floods by showing some Dunkirk spirit, but not at Westminster.
As the floodwaters start receding and inundated areas begin the slow process of rebuilding, the political blame game is well under way.
Prime minister David Cameron has done his best to be seen to be in control of the situation. He pledged that “money is no object” , although he later made it clear that those limitless funds applied only to “this relief effort”.
“Whatever money is needed, we will spend it,” he said. In total, an additional £130 million has been allocated to repairing and maintaining flood defences.
Taking the chance to score some political points, the Conservatives were keen to advertise that this money was only available because the government has kept a lid on spending and reduced the deficit.
Elsewhere, environment secretary Owen Paterson – who has been out with an eye operation at the start of this month – has been labelled “the fool of the floods” for an apparent lack of action despite chairing a number of Cobra meetings.
Stepping in while Paterson recovered was the communities’ secretary, Eric Pickles. He apologised for relying on the Environment Agency’s advice: “I thought we were working with experts,” he said. A day later, he told the House of Commons his admiration for the agency’s work “exceeds no one”.
Labour blasted the government for ill-judged spending cuts and then reversing them with the “extra” funding. Maria Eagle, Labour’s shadow environment secretary, accused the government of “fiddling the figures” to show funding had increased. She claimed there had been a fall from £670 million in 2010/11 to £573 million in 2011/12.
Ed Miliband highlighted the proposed redundancies of 550 Environment Agency flooding staff as an example of how the cuts would hamper recovery efforts and the ability to prevent flooding in the future. The redundancies are now on hold, at least until the “current flooding has subsided”.