Behind the scenes at the storm tanks at Budds Farm, Havant
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00:00Yeah sure, so my name's John Pennycutt and I'm the Managing Director for Wastewater at Southern.
00:09Sure, so Bud's Farm in its current form where we are today was built in around 1998 and before then
00:15all of the sewage from Havant, Portsmouth and surrounding areas were just not treated at all
00:20and was just put straight out to sea. Since then that treat, that sewage is captured
00:25and recycled back through the treatment works and that's around about 120 million litres a day
00:31on a day like today. So for the way, for when surface water flows into our sewers whether
00:35that's from car parks, roofs or other buildings that then flows into our network and that can
00:41quadruple the flows that come through to Bud's Farm. So you can see around us are the storm
00:45tanks that we capture that flow and that then flows back into the treatment works when the
00:50flows have gone down. We're currently investing 18 and a half million pounds in the site behind
00:54me here to build a new storm tank that's to increase the storage on site by around about 50%
01:00and that means that we capture and treat around 95% of all the sewage that flows through
01:04from this area. But that's clearly not enough and our customers want us to go much further
01:09and we're going to do that by building more storm tanks such as the ones you can see behind me
01:13but also really looking to tackle the problem at source. So disconnecting the surface water from
01:19houses, car parks, supermarkets, letting that settle in the natural environment and not needing
01:24to come to a place like this for treatment in the first place. Sure so a site like Bud's Farm
01:30has a capacity, it's a biological process with mechanical pumps and other mechanical electrical
01:35equipment so it has a design level capacity which as I say is around about 120 million
01:40litres a day where you get more flow coming through than that. We don't want to flood the
01:44sites, we don't want to flood people's properties so we capture that here when obviously all of our
01:49treatment, we've got about 50,000 metres cubed of storage space on the tanks behind me, when that
01:55then becomes full there's nowhere else for the flow to go so it weirs over and it goes out from
01:59something called a long sea outforce that's three and a half kilometres offshore into the Solent
02:04and that very dilute sewage then gets released at that point. So capturing and treating more of that
02:10and not having it come here in the first place is really what we want to see. So on a dry day
02:15these sites and this treatment process performs perfectly and we don't see any spills
02:20from our process. Clearly the sites when they have more rainfall because that's effectively
02:25what's making the site spill, when that comes through you do get the site spill more. So we've
02:29just had the wettest 18 months on record and that has meant that we have had more storm overflows
02:34than historically we would have on average. So as particularly you get large areas of
02:39roofs and buildings that act as a sort of runoff and it goes straight into sewer you get really
02:44big spikes in the overflows that happen from our sites because it's a real wall of water that comes
02:50through to our treatment works which they can't cope with. We're building more storage solutions
02:55like this, what we call grey solutions, concrete and steel. Obviously that's in the changing climate
03:01is only going to take us so far as another 15 years we're back here again building even bigger
03:06tanks. So I think what we're doing as well as this is we're also disconnecting and solving the problem
03:10at source by making sure just like lots of more newly designed systems the surface water never
03:16gets into our system in the first place and it sort of naturally soaks away where it falls
03:21and that's better for the environment and better for our assets and better for the better for the
03:25coastline.