Climate Vulnerable Mains
Aggressive soils and extreme weather make Anglian Water’s pipes vulnerable to failure. MapleSky developed innovative climate models to help Anglian quantify and reduce the impact of the environment on our networks.
At Anglian Water we set ourselves ambitious targets in terms of reducing leakage, reactive bursts and interruptions to supply for our customers, as well as ensuring we can deliver safe drinking water to customers in our region for generations to come. The unique nature of East Anglia’s geography brings many challenges, many of which are exacerbated by the effects of climate change.
In our region we have many soils that are corrosive, as well as those that shrink when they dry out. As one of the hottest and driest regions in the UK, and with summers expected to get hotter, ground movement from soil shrinkage is becoming a bigger problem for our pipes. We are already seeing the impact this is having on our infrastructure; the unprecedented hot summer of 2022 saw a dramatic rise in cement-based pipe bursts.
Another challenge to overcome was the fact that methods of data collection have changed throughout the years, leaving an inconsistent set of data that can misguide decision makers.
To address these issues, we engaged Dr Tim Farewell and his small team from MapleSky, (an environmental data science organisation) who could model the impact of climate change on our infrastructure to mitigate these risks, and therefore reduce the impact on customers in both the short and long term.
MapleSky helped us to quantify the impact of soil and weather on our networks through a three step process:
1
Building scripted processes to clean historic burst data and ensure new data is fit for purpose
2
Create accurate models of pipe failure
3
Identify assets at highest risk so interventions can be made
Prior to this work, cleaning burst data used to be a labour intensive, manual procedure that took months to do, and as such was only completed once a year. Now, the MapleSky process has cleaned over 90,000 burst main jobs, ensuring they add value to predictive models. The new processes take minutes, not months, so the new data can be cleaned and used to inform in-season modelling.
Where previously there was uncertainty as to the impact climate change would have on our mains network, we now have the results of advanced climate modelling using cleaned data to identify and replace ‘climate vulnerable mains.’
MapleSky’s work has helped identify our climate vulnerable mains and will be used to prioritise our efforts to mitigate the impacts of failure.”
Richard Fielding, Anglian Water Lead