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Everything you need to know about making the most of your existing assets when implementing effective water pollution prevention in 42 minutes.

If you prefer to read the transcript is below.

Tales From the Field 3 – Effective Water Pollution Prevention in Effect – Making the most of your existing assets.

Transcription Details:

Date:November 29, 2019
Input sound file:https://youtu.be/jYLSutV2rBg 

Making the most of your existing assets. This is our third delve into this webinar scene, I’m trying to get some information across to share what we see every day, how we’re working to prevent water pollution. I’m aiming here to simplify the process that we use when dealing with water pollution containment, especially environmental on the training. Hopefully, there’s some information we put across today that you’ll be able to use. Please, before I start, if you’ve got anything to ask, or you need to speak to me one-to-one or get in touch with us, you know, please do. We’re always there trying to help, it’s a challenge of ours. We actually make our business from selling the pollution containment valves, the ToggleBlok systems, and working for companies but we also want to help other people pick up and follow the guidance and actually follow the same process because it will protect the environment. 

So, I’ve done this before and you may already know who I am. A little bit of an introduction to me, my name is David Cole. I served my apprenticeship with Ford Motor Company in a place called Leamington Spa in Warwickshire, England. I worked there for 24 years, believe it or not. While I was there I was involved in dealing with pollution incidents and spills and breakdowns of machinery, it was significant spills that we used to have. 

At that time I came up with a product called Envirovalve, which in 1998 I was thinking, I’m going to make myself millions. What I worked out was that I could control drainage very quickly, and if I control drainage and isolate flow where I wanted it to be stopped, I could then remove the spillage without using spill products, so it wasn’t going to landfill. I could then send any polluting materials back for recycling. It’s quite a good idea. It’s taken 20 odd years to actually get it to the point where now businesses do this as a standard thing. DrainBlok is one of our portable piece of equipment, it’s something the UK Fire Service use, the Environment Agency, have a version of that and supply it to the Fire Brigade in the UK. It’s used to block drains quickly where there isn’t any other protection in place. APEA which is a fuel industry in the UK, lobby group gave me an award for one of our various designs there. 

I suppose, for me, the biggest point, turning point for me and why I’m here today really is I was asked by the EA to sit on the writing of CIRIA c736 in 2012. This was as a result of the Buncefield fire where we didn’t have any real understanding of what would happen if certain things happened. That to me, was like a turning point. So, from that event, what we did is we wrote this new guidance. I was heavily involved with it, I acted as one of the launch speakers on the launch day. And since that time, I’ve carried on trying to educate different businesses, from consultants to manufacturing companies about using the guidance, because it’s a really interesting guidance to pick up. It’s free, so anybody can get it anywhere around the world. You can download it by the British taxpayer, it’s there to help. It’s not there to be a hindrance, despite what people think. It’s there to help. 

Why does the regulator want me to evidence risk of water pollution?

So, a little bit now of what we’re doing. One of the things that I do is I use LinkedIn a lot. I try to put stories on LinkedIn all the time about what we’re doing around pollution events all around the world that’s happening, whether it’s plastic, whether it’s chemical spills, whether it’s fire. So, it’s something that’s come about more and more, and people get involved and send me replies back, and there’s always a little bit of a history or side of things. So, they, the regulator is just asking for things that can’t be done. They’re causing a problem that they’re asking too much of us. You know, we’ve got businesses to run. This is really key. 

So, I’ve put like four points together. So, why does the regulator want me to evidence risk of water pollution? What they’re really getting back if we get right back to what happened at Buncefield was an event happened, a disaster happened, and the site itself had no clear plan of how it would stop that entering the environment. By entering the environment, we lost water obstruction, and you can see that’s lost the British taxpayer forever, so nobody can really add up what that’s worth. So, that’s why the regulator is asking this question and asking it more and more. They’ll be driving it more and more. What they’re asking people to do is, can you evidence that what you’ve done, or what you know, is at least going to give us a level of protection if something goes wrong on your site? 

Why does the regulator keep referencing CIRIA c736?

[00:04:10]: Why does the regulator keep referring to this CIRIA c736? It’s because it’s kind of what the only thing they’ve really got. Because in 2015, PPG, some of you might know, the pollution prevention guidelines, you still might use them today, because they’re really useful guidance notes. But these are kind of archived; this was mainly due to cuts and a decision made by the UK government that, that the regulator is asking the regulator and not really offer guidance anymore. So, we’ve got this CIRIA 736. This is an industrial document that’s funded by the British taxpayer, supported by the EA. So, it kind of makes it, it’s a guidance that they can use and say to people, can you please, please refer to that? That’s what we want you to follow.

So, that’s why they’re doing it. They’re doing it really because as a regulator, their problem is you mustn’t pollute. If you pollute, we’re going to execute you. They’re trying to be helpful, which some people think is actually they’re not being helpful, but they’re trying to be helpful by directing you as, as end-users or designers, whatever it is, to look at this guidance, because this is, this is kind of saying what they see as a problem and it’s giving some answers in design of how they want you to approach pollution management. There’s nothing more. 

Regulator is being awkward and this is pointless

[00:05:21]: Recently, I got some feedback from, from LinkedIn to one of my colleagues who put something out about spill mapping which we’re going to talk about later. The regulator’s been awkward and this is pointless, because what they’re saying is the regulator is just making more work for them. I hope today that what I’m going to talk about today, changes that attitude because it isn’t pointless. It’s very simple to do. And if you take the right approach, no matter what you’ve got, even if you’ve got no money to spend so, you can actually be prepared. The regulator really is trying to get us to do. They want us to be interested in stopping pollution, whether it’s plastic pollution, whether it’s chemical pollution, whether it’s a pollution from a fire, water runoff, or just general activity. They’re trying to get people to start to take responsibility for what their problem is. There’s there is no excuse. And I think that’s British taxpayers, so the taxpayers around the world probably would say, “Well, why are we paying for other people’s mistakes?”

We can’t afford to complete a risk model of our site, pollution containment isn’t viable.

And another one that comes in, we can’t afford to complete a risk model of our site. Pollution containment isn’t viable. I don’t think you can ever say that until you’ve actually done and completed some sort of risk model. And that might mean just purely getting somebody in who knows about pollution, somebody like ourselves, who would actually give you some evidence and give you some feedback. When we go to sites, we often see that, you know, we can’t think about it but there’ll be decanted chemicals over the top of the storm drain, very simply as there’ll be decanted chemicals over the top of the storm drain or seal that storm drain off, fit of some buffer to control it if something happened. It’s not exactly impossible. It’s not, it’s certainly can’t be said that it’s not viable. It’s simple to say and it’s quite astonishing at some levels, that people don’t actually notice the very basics, the very simple point that while I’m actually doing something that I’m unloading my fuel oil and filling my tank, and I’m doing it in the street, there is a potential if that tank or if that fuel line breaks, it’s going to go straight down the drain – a cause a pollution incident. 

What is the, that pollution incident? What people are finding is those consequences are high, you will get prosecuted, you may have to completely pay for the whole remediation costs. So, that’s why you need to understand that take this a little bit more seriously. It’s not the regulator being awkward. It’s a requirement. It’s something that we have to do. 

So, just another screen. These are the companies that we worked with, I think I could say that these have been really supportive companies that we’ve worked with. So. we’ve gone in them; they’ve often had an historical attitude. Management, I think I’ll say the Highways England. They fit Penstock valves on virtually every major highway leak. Not quite sure how anybody could say to me how they’d ever be really operated properly; I think there’s a problem because there’s no automation on that most of them. So, how would you actually get to a valve when you’ve got an RTA accident? We’ve worked recently for Jaguar Land Rover; we’ve done some projects with Whirlpool, looking at their drainage and standard drainage; Muller, as dairy sites, we look at how we control milk spills, etc. And Biffa and DHL on waste link.

So, all of these sites where the people we’ve worked with. So, okay, let’s get going on to what I really want to get into. So, the key, key reference documents–these are the documents that anything that I do today, I really want you to pick it up and read it. So, CIRIA 736, I want you to read it. I really want people to download it, I want them to read it. To be fair, if you read the first four or five sections, you’ve got the risk element that I’m really on about. The other elements are so useful to be more formed towards the construction and the design side of things. Purely, a site and you just want to understand really about, well, how do I understand what my pollution risk is? Just the first few pages really. The first few sections, sorry, about 20-30 pages. Get into it and read it. 

Sentencing guidelines, I’ve stuck these in there because these are the driver. So, any business, these are the driver because they don’t want to have to pay the fines. They don’t want to have to be taken to court and prosecuted and potentially then lose other customers that white comes to them because once you be prosecuted, you’ve committed a criminal offense. I know as a business, we’re quite often asked supplier forms, and one of those question is have you been prosecuted for an HSE incident or an environmental incident? If you have, there’s a chance that company won’t be able to sign you on as a supplier. So, I’ve put that in there because I think people should be aware of it because it’s really important, because it’s the game changer. 

And fire prevention plans. This is something that the EA did bring out, so it is a guidance note they brought out in 2016. It refers you straight back to CIRIA 736, so it’s deliberately there to ask you to look at it. They brought it up, doing very well with managing fire, water runoff. And they’re trying to, they’re trying to push people without giving guidance because honestly, that’s what the UK Government doesn’t want them to do. But it allows them to actually put something out where there is a real problem. 

So, getting started, okay. So, if you’re actually looking at your assets that you’ve got, before you do anything, I think you need to be downloading this guidance, and then just reading what the guidance is all about. So, you could be small site, big site, doesn’t matter–take the same approach. So, as you see, you probably only got to read sort of 20 pages. So, I put here that CIRIA 736 section 4.3.3 and section 3.8. Four.three.three (4.3.3) is basically a little caption I’ve pulled out of that page. And what that’s asking you to look at, not necessarily control, but understand, is what would your site do if you had a fire, so you had a total fire, you’re now losing materials. You’ve now got a fire, fire brigade on site, so this could be a Tesco supermarket, it doesn’t have to be some chemical plant, just look at it… business. You’ve got a fire, the fire brigade is there, so they’re chucking water at it because they’re trying to put it out. 

You’ve got a duration of 24 hours they’re asking you to look at. You’ve also got to think about if it rains a one-in-10-year rains some of it, which is put into the guidance. And luckily in the guidance, they even give you the figures to work, too, so you don’t have to employ an expert. You can actually take this information and actually create your own volumes of water. I often use that another reference point is Magic Maps, which allows me to take surface area of sites and you can really use that to actually…this. That’ll start to give you volumes of water and might start to open your eyes to realize, well, actually we could cause a pollution incident. So, how do we then go about controlling it? 

And these are stuff that I’ve got here. This one is 10 years, site accuracy. 

So, then what we look at from this is the only way forward with this on this asset, if you look at it, if you want to do it in full, and this isn’t something that’s overcomplicated and something that’s over expensive to do. You need to site accurate typography, so you need to know how the lot, the layout, and you need to know up-to-date drainage plans. I don’t know if anybody’s had any visits or regular visits, sipper, National Resource, Wales. But one of the things they like to see is, can you give us some up-to-date drainage plans. This doesn’t really need to be a scrap of paper; it should really be an accurate drawing of your drainage to show where your drains go. What they want to know is where does it leave site? Because that is your initial pathway. 

So, if you’re looking at your asset and you say, “Right, I need to be able to stop a pollution event, a delivery event,” a thousand liters have a cue from an IBC to be saying, “Where’s the drainage go?” “Can I fit an isolation valve, probably a toggle block?” because it’s something that isolates the drain. Again, I reiterate, don’t use the word penstock valve because the EA will pick you up because that is a flow control device. You’ve got to make sure that the penstock valve you use is actually a pollution containment device. It needs to stop the flow, it needs to be off grid, so he can’t be connected to the mains power, because it’s a good chance and pollution incident when you’ve actually got a power cut or a power failure. It needs to be out of work quickly. So, I’d say 10 seconds from the point, you activate it to the point it’s actually isolated to flow, but that gives you the drainage channel. So, then when you look at the site topography, what you’re looking down at is what does it look like? Above ground, so it’s starting to flood the site.

Evidence that the design works. You need to know your site works, that is Section 3.8. It’s worth reading in the guidance; it’s only a small paragraph. What they say to you is this, don’t say I fitted an isolation valve when you’ve got a 20-year old penstock at the end of the site. You need to be evidencing it to screw fix and you can buy some drainage dye. You can put a hosepipe on a valve, close it and see whether the dye comes through it. If the dye comes through it, it’s not working. That’s your evidence that you need to escalate and think about what you’ve done. It may be the wrong valve; it may be the valve needs some repairs. Quite often with any valves we put in the bench, it needs to be maintained; you need to keep looking at it and checking it. But this is what they’re asking. This is what the regulator is expecting, not to spend thousands of pounds asking you just to do if you’ve got something that works. Evidence if I shut that drainage network off, I’m not going to pollute outside and try an evidence how long you’ve got before you need a drainage contractor on site, sucking out your drains or sucking at you’re above-ground containment. 

So, what I’ve got here is this is a typical topography of a site that I’m going to talk about later. But this is typical, so what we do is we’re looking at spot points. You can see here if, you see here is the entrance into the site; here’s the building; here’s the main aqua drainage and these the perimeter site. You see what, there’s no actual boundary there, it’s, there’s nothing there at the moment. But what we’ve done is we’ve taken the topography of the total site, what we’re looking at it then is what we’re going to build up is, in this risk assessment, is that’s the asset they’ve got. That is what it is. Can it be, can it be easily built up? Can it be easily made, so that we can actually contain more water? 

That this site here and here is down the drainage, so this is another site so we need accurate drainage plans. This is a site that we did probably two or three years. This is the draining site, so you can see the red, that’s the internal drainage within the site. I’m not too worried really about that. We got a foul sewer; we’ve got a storm drain. I’m really just interested in the storm drain. The foul sewer has got a maximum flow rate. Potentially, that could be used actually to allow fire water discharge, if we don’t discharge above what is allowable at the time of the event. 

So, this, this, this understanding this asset is really important because these can actually be the pathways that we allow pollution out. Getting some good images of the drainage. Areas we did, we fill in drainage cards, which is not something that, you know, anybody can do, lifting the manhole, measuring the pipe work, measuring the depth, measuring what the chamber is, because that potentially becomes a catchment volume. So, you can see there, you know, that that, that gully manhole we got there could probably easily contain if isolated 1000 cubes of other chemical, so it allows us to develop what we’re actually looking for. It might just be that we want localized control, so the assets are always there. All we need to be looking at is how can we turn that into a temporary tertiary catchment point.

Now, something that’s really, really important, important and something that a lot of people or businesses kind of have difficulty with, is getting a good fire and environmental impact assessment. Now, this one here is, is one that a colleague of mine does. David Hanlon. I’ll shout his name because he’s really good guy, really useful contact to have. Now, what he does is he will produce field, different assessment for different sites. Here, he’s done one for DHL. It’s a COMAH site, so it’s actually, obviously quite a lengthy document. But you can see the image here, that’s a fire. That’s what he’s looking at. If that place goes up and turns into the fire, how do I contain that materials on site, so we don’t cause an impact to the environment? 

When we do these documents, which is sometimes really inviable, by using somebody who’s got fire experience, and he’s obviously an ex-fire officer but also with environmental knowledge and impact, actually calculate and work out what sort of material is going to get thrown on that fire and what that volume is. If that volume is calculated incorrectly, you can actually be building bunds, or building tertiary containment, well, in excess of what’s really required, or possibly not big enough. It’s a really good investment, something that everybody should do. Again, all that David’s doing here or this assessment he’s doing is actually looking at what is already there and what is needed to be done to properly improve it. It’s, its assets are already there. If your, if your factory is stuck in the middle of a triple SI location, you’ve got to put more effort into it because the impact potentially from a fire is going to be far greater. 

So, I’ve got three case studies. I said I want you to do them short because I know that when I ran this, it’s just dragging on. Anybody can ring me up and have a chat with me about different projects. So, if you want to arrange a one-to-one meeting, please do. 

So, I’m just going to start with Kellogg’s. We’ve done it before but the reason why I brought it in again is because it’s a really useful one and one that we’ve done and completed. So, this site, again, was under pressure from the EA to protect local waterways due to the close proximity of an effluent treatment plan. That’s, that’s the situation that sites in. 

So, the challenge, the site has begun the process to build a bund to 110%, and this needed to stop because what they’re going to do was, they were going to create a bund out of an effluent treatment plant they won’t be able to drive into. They’re going to create a confined space; they we’re looking at over two-meter high bunded walls. It wasn’t… I think the costs were in excess of half a million pounds. I think the business itself was saying it’s not viable. What do we do? I think by luck, we, we brought them into CIRIA 736, introduced them to it because they hadn’t been introduced to it, which you’d like to think that any architect or designer would have introduced them to it when they asked the challenge initially. But the evidence to business using CIRIA 736 to understand the total risk. That was our, that was our challenge–to actually understand what the problem was, and then design a solution, trying to use what we’ve got. 

The model, if any of you have seen my webinar before, this is the model that runs, this is what happens. What you’ve got here is a placer. It was decided that there was a hole in this, in this, in this balance tank. So, that hole actually then would leak out 450 hole. What you see here is from topography, from drainage, obviously the drainage is isolated. We’re looking at a drainage, a bit above ground flow path. This is how that, that liquid would shoot out of this site if no protection was there. And at the moment, this was their problem. This was obviously to evidence to, to the business that they needed to do something, because literally, the water is spreading everywhere. It’s uncontrolled. We’ve got various breaches and pollution, but it’s mainly into the canal that’s the main problem. So, this gave the, the engineering department something to present to their management.

So, the solution: the spill modelled the actual risk based on the extreme events, which you’ve just seen. We should design a solution using existing features. So, what we’re saying here is we have an effluent, we have an effluent treatment discharge, so that gives us a maximum rate that we could discharge at. A lot of this material on this site could be discharged to that, it was no problem. No issue with the water company. Drastic reduce the bunding, that was really our, our aim was to actually stop building a brand-new structure when it didn’t need to be done. We’re going to use what’s there and to achieve a design within a reasonable budget. 

So, what you’ve got here now is this is the contained design. If you’ve seen this before, I apologize. But it’s, what we’re using here is we’re using the car park, we’re using an area that’s not really used. It’s not deep water. This is just overspills, using what’s already there to contain the flow. What you’ve got here is, if I could get my arrow to work, just here, they’ve got to put some improved Kerbing in not, not high 300 mil Kerbing, it’s just standard 110 Kerbing. That’s all they’ve got to do to create just a backwater, push the water back into this area here. And what you can see here is, again, just to raise a point, so for me, what they were looking at here, what they were intended to do was just right raise the ground, so the water is pushed back into this area. You’re using the existing asset, the bund actually where the wall is, the bund wall here, is now only 0.7 of a meter high, so you haven’t got any other cost. You’re blocking the drainage obviously; the surface water drainage in this area is isolated. They’ve used toggle block, thank you very much Kellogg’s. But what they’ve got else here is they’ve actually left the effluent to discharge its maximum flow rate. This is. this is absolute worst-case scenario. Simple, but it works.

So, now we come to a new one, it’s Greencore, which is an interesting one, because it’s common now to lots of businesses. Water companies are trying to ask businesses to look at their environment and what they’re discharging. So, they’re asking them to put more and more effluent treatment processes on site. They don’t want raw sewage, or just pH balance sewage going down to the sewage system. They want it to be treated…charging. So, what you’ve got here is a lot of businesses are trying to put and install effluent treatment processes. It’s got its benefits because it means that they don’t get so many issues, and they’ve got control of what they’re putting out, control of their costs if they’ve got to go there for an effluent treatment plant. So, the situation is installation of proposed effluent treatment plant. So, you’re going to ask for a permit by variation.  

So, you’ve got to satisfy the regulator to obtain that permit that what you’ve designed and what you’re going to do is going to control and manage any significant event. Loss of a book storage tank, 80 cubes for instance on this site here, can you contain it if we have an incident and it’s raining at the same time? Where will it go? 

So, what we’ve done, and this is something that anybody could do if you just take the right approach. You got to know the drainage, so you’ve got to do a full drainage survey site. Didn’t have a full site drainage survey? What we needed to do is just make sure that what we’ve got in front of us was correct, because if we’ve missed an outpoint, where we’ve got actually a flow going out, and we don’t control the whole design, everything we’re doing is a complete waste of time. So, what we’re looking at is, it might just be that we lose a cube of some acid that we delivered. So, let’s make a drainage system that we can isolate that drainage in under 10 seconds, anytime, to contain that minor spill. Then we look at the site topography, which I’m going to show you in a minute, and that basically is looking at the site to actually evidence that we can actually contain it. Where’s it ran? Once we flooded the drains, wedge or go there, we look at the bulk storage volume on this side, it was actually 80 cubes. But their documentation, which in this CIRIA guide, that 1:10 year rainfall event on that platform, using the Magic Maps to give us the area, so it’s done as a desktop exercise as well. That gives us a volume of liquid that allows us to say right now build our models through micro drainage.  We identified the correct point to fit the valves necessarily to isolate the drainage.

So, this is a project that we did with a company called MVC, which be really helpful, helps a lot on this. So, what you’ve got here is you’ve got the site… And the model now, if you remember me talking about CIRIA, we talked about this 24-hour event. What we’ve done on this site, we’ve actually come to a 12-hour event. It’s deemed actually at 12 hours that this site will have control. In other words, they’ll have a response team on-site, tankers on-site actually removing any effluent, any spillages. The effluent treatment plants actually sit here, and our valve, the actual isolation, the surface water, sits here. So, what happens is once that surface water is closed off, the backflow is all… you can see this frontier, a real action to be taken in this area, so that fills up and actually floods out into the storm drains which is back into like a loading bay area and this is where the depth is. You can see the boundary of the site there where my arrow is. And you can also see at the back corner there, there’s a point where the drainage can’t get out and we get the high rise there. Those areas there, as you see there in the yellow, 0.6-meter depth, probably moved up to 0.7. The rest of it, the blue and the red was actually already covered by the wall. All you have to do, all the site have to do… the depth. 

We’re not looking here about much of a bund, so we’re looking at this shock loading. This would be a steady fill-up. A slow steady fill-up as you started to feed, and this is the exceedance point where we get into 182 cubes–we’re well beyond. What a reasonable event on that site would look like. That was then submitted to the Environment Agency and I think all agreed that that was a sensible option. Very little really was spent in that because the money needs to be spent on the effluent treatment plant. What you’ve got here, you’ve got toggle block…and you’ve done some minor bunding there, and you’ve done some tertiary minor bunding there to build up to that corner. These are the points obviously where it builds up. So, it’s basically like a wall as anybody knows topography. So, these points we have to clarify. Job done, simple, because what you’re using is what’s already there. You’re not altering much; you’re not investing a great deal. 

So, another one that we’re working on actually quite, quite current, at the moment, is the situation. So, we’ve got, so they’re actually, which is quite common, which is starting, so people are actually looking to buy a new location and they need to understand the viability of the site for development. So, they’re looking at a shed, so looking at a place that’s already been built, probably have been already used for something else. Can they change its use, which again, is going to be a permit change? Can they actually look at that site and say, “Well, the cost that site’s brilliant, we can, we can rent it for X. But how much work do we need to do to look at the containment side of it? Because we’re going to get asked by the EA to refer to CIRIA, and look at fire, water pollution containment.” And, and obviously, we’ve worked with Stericycle before on a number of sites, so they’ve kind of got it. So, what they’re looking at now is instead of going, “Yeah, that’s a great site. They’re looking good to go.” Right, before we can invest in a site, let’s see whether actually it can be built and do what we wanted to do. 

So, we’re looking at is the challenge that’s to understand the current level of water pollution control without any current site activity. So, really, what we’re trying to say is the site is currently closed, can it do what… or is there quite a lot of investment to be done? Design investment, which is probably going to eat up some capital, which probably be better to find a different location that may already have been taken into account. I just want to pop over onto this one. We, I remember doing a recent project with, with Jaguar Land Rover, who bought a brand-new warehouse from Winvic. But nobody considered firewater containment in building the, the Winvic shed, so they put the, the psionic drainage. It was connected straight to the surface water drainage, and Rover moved in. Of course, the EA are asking them to have firewall containment as part of their permit. Because the drainage hasn’t been designed to work that way, it’s not easy. It’s a challenge because then, what you got to do is you’ve got to reinvest. I think quite a lot of money was spent on actually redesigning a lot of the drainage network. 

Important point is, understand how it works first before you dive in, because if something’s been built and not designed as a manufacturing site or not designed with fire and water containment in mind, you could end up… it. I think what we’d like to see is anybody building a shed actually does this as part of their design, because once it’s done, it’s done. 

And so, what we’ve done is drainage survey of, of the site and an accurate connectivity plan, so we will know where the drains go, topography of the site, then we got a spill assessment model in CAD. 

So, what you’ve got here is perfect little drainage, so it’s not a big site. Perfect drainage information is telling us what we need to know. The actual drain here, which is on this drawing I’ve not completed…that we’ve got a run of the drain running out onto the site into the street. So, logically, what we’re looking at is we need to fit a containment valve at this point here, depending on how the topography works. The flooding works, you see we’ve got the point’s coming back. So, the logical point is to fit a valve on the out point here. That blocks the drains; that’s going to give us most pollution will be contained. I can’t remember the exact figure, but I think it’s about 70 cubes, it’s contained within the drainage network. That’s quite a lot of, of control. So, this site without doing anything to the drainage network, has now got a reasonable amount of containment. 

This is kind of the site now as a, as an academy, so an image of what it looks like. What you can see here is, there was no wall here, they’re going to need to build a wall, they’re going to need to build a wall on here to actually do it. It’s a driveway in. The driveway in obviously is the point where we will, we will potentially… it’s our lowest points, so we may have to do is put a tabletop onto there. But remember, table tops with forklifts and some vehicles could cause issues. So, this will be put into. If this site is suitable for what’s required and if the EA is saying, “Right, okay,” because of what it is, we want to have a 24-hour fire-water containment plan. They’re going to need to build obviously some significant structure around the site. By doing that, obviously, there’s a cost, and that cost now could be looked at before going any further into the actual build. 

Right, I’ve just coming to the end now. I’ve got a couple of slides to go to Toggleblok, Don’t slow flow – STOP FLOW. The idea of Toggleblok is to stop flow in the event of emergency. It’s not a flow control device, it’s to stop flow. You can see here a couple of installations just like CIRIA c736, one installation that we’ve recently done for Toyota. What you’ve got there is the control panel solar, so it’s always online. It’s not, it’s not off, waiting for mains power, etc. Simple little plate you can see in there, which was loaded into on a on a head wall and we built up a valve that sits there on the outlet side. The event of an incident this drops, bang, stops the flow. Yes, it’s not that easy to open these… to actually allow water through, it allows drain flow, and then they can be reset. But the idea of these systems are they are there for that catastrophic failure, for testing. But catastrophic failure, CIRIA c736 asks you to evidence that the system works. The one thing we do know about our valves is when you close them, they just stop the flow and that’s what they’re intended to do. 

Anything else is really, you should have an action plan. It’s all there in the guidance using what you got. So, this is really taking the point of be careful that you haven’t got a site that’s got all, we got some penstocks. Make sure that they actually stopped the flow. And make sure that if they’re saying, “Oh we have to walk down the site to operate the valves,” who’s going to do that? Who’s going to lift the manhole cover? How can that be done in the event of an incident? There are quite a few sites we go to that use this as their, their scheme, a manhole. They lift it, that’s a two-man lift. It’s in the mid-corners of the yard yet your site’s on fire, so not really very thought about. Does the system actually work? 

And that’s what the CIRIA bit 3:8 is all about. It’s not all about you got to buy the perfect valve. It’s the design you’ve put in place actually work. Can you operate it? 

So, today’s talk was more about the assets that are already there, because there’s a lot of pieces of kit in there. So, I’ve got Kerbing tabletops, car parks–they’re always there for the attenuation. Great, because most sites now are forced to fit attenuation tanks. So, part of it is we have got a site, we’ve got which is a waste site with a 250 Q attenuation tank, that’s made slightly bigger because what’s collected in the store and a fire-water event at the same time. So, what they do is they increase the size of that, so they’ve got actually below ground storage so there is no real demand on the above ground area, because it’s the drainage it’s stopped. We block up and fill the attenuation. The attenuation was built bigger to take that extra capacity setup and the guidance. So, you know, on new sites, sometimes with the assets, if you’re going to be building not digging a hole anyway, can you dig a little bit bigger or a little bit greater area to give you the capacity to cover the problem? Sacrificial areas, obviously they’re always there. 

Loading bays are perfect because these are the points we were actually at a site the other day where the loading bay is actually being flooded because, again, somebody has put a valve system in and made the decision to close the drainage permanently, so the drainage is always closed. What this has done, in my view, is now surcharge the drainage, so the drainage is always full. They monitor the pH then of that water. The pH is not balancing, probably because you’re holding stagnant water—a problem for flooding. But my bigger concern probably, not being a civil engineer for that side of it, if I’m forcing drainage to be constantly flooded, I’m potentially pushing water away. It’s finding another route off site and potentially undermining my foundations. So, sometimes when you take this approach of a pollution containment system, you’ve got to have the right approach to take it. You know, think about what you’re doing, because if you get it wrong, it’s not going to work. 

Now, I’ve got here, the bottom picture here, this is one of the pictures out there. Yet the red valve is actually a valve. What I always say, I built it in my shed; you can see one of our field clamps on there. That is actually a retrofit because the original device didn’t, didn’t hold very well. This was the penstock valve at the site had put in place. This is PPG paints up in, in leads way. And what happened was they realized when they close that valve, it never stopped. This is a 700,000 pound car park, so it’s an asset they’ve built into development. The assets only any good though if this actually works, so when they initially went in, that didn’t stop the flow. So, this is a retro fit; this is the first ever ToggleBlok valve that we sort of ever developed. It’s a bit of a Heath-Robinson design really because nothing was available. I had to make something out of my own head, and that’s what it is. 

So, that valve that allows this area to flood design works. It’s really good, really simple. Gully pots, oil separators. We do get a lot of sites that talk about oil separators. Oil separates water; they don’t offer you much containment capacity, very limited amount. If you actually do overflow them, the oil is going to come out the top potentially out of the turrets. So, really, when you’ve got oil separators, great for monitoring that you’ve got oil. So, monitoring that you’ve got an oil issue, so you can actually set your probes where we currently use a lot of Euro gauge probes, nice and simple capacitance sitting in the top. If we see that a change that can alarm our valves to shut which is quite common for us to do but also allows a site say, well, we’ve had a spillage because that’s a…Gully pots. Really important one, because it’s a little lot about plastics in the news and stuff in the, in the, in the environment. These are one of your first environmental responses. They contain hydrocarbons, they will contain rubbish, they will contain leaves, the detritus that actually can cause you problems and sediment. What happens is, or what we believe happens is years ago, they used to put filters in them.

The filters used to get left so they block up, so we got rid of them. We designed them now as a gully pot. So, what you’ve got here in this is… I’ll probably tell you people who know the water comes in, the water sits at this level here. You can see the point there. So, that’s your level there at that, sorry, at that point there, that’s your water level, that’s your natural water level. That’s where all your bits of rubbish, your cigarette, and your plastic, your hydrocarbons, they’re going to float there. At the bottom, anything heavy, it’s going to drop to the bottom. Clean water, crystal clear water will flow there, from out of there, right there when it rains. What happens is stand or councils, people with gully suckers who don’t know what they’re doing, they suck the top stopper out. Once you’ve taught that, take that top stopper out.

What happens is when you get heavy rainfall, obviously the gully pot fills up, gets quite high, as soon as that level reaches that point there, everything that was contained wheels over. It literally wheels down the route. It doesn’t come back through; it just wheels back over. The oil allows itself, the paper, the rubbish, the cigarette ends, end up wearing over it. Again, if you’ve got a sight because often people look at these put drain mats over them and they’ve got pollution, think about it. If you cover one over, all the water just run to the next one to the next one to the actual. Just think about how these things are connected and how they’re supposed to work, and if you’ve got any of these assets, check them; make sure that stuff is in place; make sure they’re not silted u past this point here, so they can’t actually work anywhere.

So, that’s done today. I hope it was interesting. Obviously, there is a little book about… You can always get in touch me, there’s my email, you can always contact me. What I’ve done here is where, you know, where we’ve put three case studies on. There are loads that we get involved with. We’re working on lots of sites. I’m not trying to shout about who we work for–that’s not my intention. What I’m trying to say is there’s really good companies out there making a massive effort to understand pollution, and they’re actually doing it now and they’re actually putting a process in place. And I like to believe that’s come from the CIRIA guide, that’s actually allowed them to actually get some evidence to prove. To list them, hopefully see you all on the on the next one. 

Speaker 2: David, David, David. Before you rush off, we’ve had a question. 

Speaker 1: Okay. 

Speaker 2: Okay, so the question is on the slide with the three bullets for containment volume calculations—

Speaker 1: Yeah. 

Speaker 2: –do we need to assume that all three bullet points could simultaneously, all consecutively, occur? Or you rather your volume based on the worst of three based on the assumption that it might be unlikely for them all to incur to occur consecutively in a relatively short period of time? 

Speaker 1: Right. I can, I can answer that. When we sat writing the guidance, so when we start having our meetings, we, we had lots of discussions about this. Now, it’s open to how you want to do it. The, the approach that we use is worst-case scenario, so we look at the 1:10. We look at loss of, of your materials, not, you know, of, obviously, you bought materials, what you think you’re going to lose? Because what potentially could stop this failure, it could be the total loss of stop. It makes you start to think about how you store your stock. In other words, so if you’ve got three buildings and you build, you put one building with everything in it, it might make you think, well, actually, we need to store areas and put gaps–this is where getting somebody like David Hanlon involved in fire. So, then we’re also looking at what the fire brigade chuck at it as well. This does give you a massive amount of liquid and it can be quite scary. But from those animations, and it probably, I don’t know who’s put that in, but, you know, please get in touch with me. From those animations…looking at worst-case scenario, but then we can draw it back because what you can argue is that isn’t potentially realistic to us. 

I think if you just saw the one that I did at Greencore, we did a 24-hour model. We were, we were containing something like it was huge 300 screens or cubes or mat… 300,000, it’s a massive figure cut when you figure it out. We tuned it back because the EA accepted at the time with, with the client. Well, actually, you…by then, because you’ve only got 80 cubes of effluent to lose and the rainstorm event. So, actually, it would be managed, the whole event would be managed, because what they were doing, they were backing it up with a drainage contractor who had guaranteed to be on site within four hours with 36,000-liter tankers removing, removing the materials. So, my answer really is think of its worst-case scenario, and then you can detune it back by knowing what your worst-case scenario is and where you sit at what time you lose control. So, in other words, if you run… and after eight hours, you lose control. You could, you’ve got evidence to say, that is actually quite reasonable, because within eight hours, we would, we would expect to have the fire out; we would expect to have things under control; we’d expect to have probably an environmental team on-site actually clearing up. 

So, the worst-case scenario gives you the problem, then engineer it backwards. Don’t take that as, “Oh, we can’t, we can’t control that,” so it’s just a complete give up. It’s actually, that gives you, that gives you a line in the sand to sort of say, “Well, if we could control that, well, everything’s sorted. We’ve got to control it.” We did do a site for Barry Callebaut chocolate factory. We modeled it with MEC. We did run the model. We put two valves, obviously, to drop the drainage. So, we obviously animated those to show drain, and they could contain everything. So, so, they didn’t have to do anything other than put two valves and that was it. That was the whole project. So, I hope that answers it. But you know, if you want to drop me a line, I can send you some sort of some of the reports, ideas that we’ve used. 

Speaker 2: Okay, cool. Excellent work, David. Well done. Really interesting and useful, I think, as always, And just to remind everyone who’s still with us, you will receive a feedback form tomorrow. If you could take two minutes to complete that, that will be really useful for us. And we will also be posting this on our blog that will happen two weeks today. You’ll be notified when that happens, and please feel free to share it if you think there are people in your business who might benefit from that. I think this was your best so far, David. Well done, man. 

Speaker 1: Cheers. Thank you. Anybody’s got any ideas? Let me know, because we do lots of sites. But if anybody wants to ask a question about this, you know, please do. Please phone us up or email me. You’re not going to get a hard sell. You’re just going to get facts, to be honest.

“I was introduced to Sandfield about six years ago when the company I worked for asked me to look at the installation of some new penstock valves and servicing of our pollution control valves across the group sites. After talking to Sandfield and meeting their engineers we gave Sandfield our UK service contract. We then went on to install Toggleblok valves as we were impressed by how it all worked with a minimum amount of civil work required in most instances. I have recommended Sandfield Penstock Solutions’ Toggleblok to many companies over the last few years. They have a very professional and effective approach to water and waste control systems.”
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