At around 1230hrs today (just 1 hour after the photoshoot this morning) the TPS started overflowing sewage. Anglian Water are currently onsite clearing up. Since it hasn’t rained in days it must be a pump failure. [edit: see comment below for Anglian Water's explanation of the problem.]
Flood water pours back into drain next to Lower Cambourne pumping station
For residents’ information, if you observe an issue at the TPS please report it to the following agencies listed below.
1. Anglian Water (24-hour emergency number 08457 145 145)
2. SCDC Environmental Health via Call Centre (08:00 to 20:00 hrs Monday to Saturday by calling the contact centre on 03450 450 063) or the Environmental Health Duty Officer via their pager service on 01253 501055.
3. Environment Agency: Report an Incident – 0800 80 70 60
4. Wildlife Trust (Cambridgeshire) Tel: 01954 713500
April 20, 2010 at 16:33
Anglian Water have been very helpful in providing some further information regarding this latest flooding incident. As you can read below this seems to have been a case of genuine human error.
Their email reads:
The TPS in Lower Cambourne was attended for a routine visit a couple of days prior to the 10 Apr and at that time it was observed that although the site was operating normally, one of the pumps was running a bit noisily and so the gang who attended raised a job for another crew to go out and lift the pump (they suspected that a piece of brick or other debris was partially blocking the pump and causing the noise).
The pump was lifted on the morning of the 10th and cleared. To enable to pump lift to take place, the inlet valve to the pumping station was closed to allow the pumps to empty the well so that the gang could see what they were doing with the pump lift (lifting pumps from wells can be pretty awkward so it is the norm to empty the well as much as possible to give the best visibility possible). This operation normally only takes 20mins or so and so this should not cause any problems at all.
Unfortunately on this occasion, after the pump was lifted and the gang attempted to return the site to service (which they thought they’d done), the inlet valve was not fully opened. It seems that the valve was stiff and so they thought that they had it fully open when in fact it was still partially closed. Looking in the well would have shown flow coming in so I can partially understand how they would make this assumption. Unfortunately this meant that although some flow was passing forward into the well, the remainder was slowly surcharging the sewers and ultimately led to an overflow. The reason that our systems didn’t detect this is that from a telemetry perspective everything seemed ok, the pumps were running and all the alarms had cleared. Luckily that when a resident contacted Anglian Water, the crew was only 10mins away and so was able to respond quickly.
We do of course sincerely apologise for the inconvenience caused, this was a genuine human error. The manager for the area has himself been out on site exercising this valve and ensuring that his team are fully aware of what happened and how.