Projects
Sewer connection, Waddesdon, case study
We were approached by Fitzgerald Building Services to connect one new property to the public sewer, on the main road running through the picturesque town of Waddesdon in Buckinghamshire.
Objective
Our objective was to make a new connection onto the public sewer in the main road running through the town. And then to lay pipework back to the boundary where our customer had terminated his pipework and built a demarcation manhole.
About the project
On this occasion our customer already had the Section 106 approval from Thames Water which was really handy, and enabled us to go straight to Highways and apply for the Section 50 application, which we always take care of on behalf of our customer. (You cannot apply for a Section 50 before you have the Section 106)
This required us filling out the Section 50 Application Forms, supplying our accreditations, insurance documents, a traffic management plan, utilities drawings for all other services (Highways have a duty of care to ensure we know where all other utilities are before we start excavating) and various other documents. For the traffic management, we opted for 2-way traffic lights, as this was quite a busy main road.
Our S50 application was rejected initially, as the road was a HS2 diversion route at the time, and traffic lights and road closures are prohibited on HS2 diversion routes. This created a huge problem for our customer as the house was pretty much finished, and waiting for HS2 to complete in the area would have meant a delay of over a year, before he could finish the project and sell the property.
If you need a sewer connection doing, please contact us as early as possible, there are many reasons why the lead-time for a sewer connection can be up to a year or more. For more information click here.
We appealed to Highways and they eventually agreed on ‘give & take’ traffic management for this job, if we were able to keep our excavation far enough over, that we could leave 7m of road remaining outside of the works, for two lanes of traffic to be maintained. We took measurements on site, and this was indeed possible.
The Section 106 approval letter from Thames water detailed connection to the public sewer by way of Junction Insertion, which is the most common method of connection for a single house. This is simply putting a Y-Junction onto the sewer – but of course it’s not that simple with it being a live sewer! It requires us to stop the flow upstream in order that our exaction is not flooded with sewerage whilst the connection is being made. We had all manner of other utilities in our excavation where the connection was made, which is usual, including a gas main and a water main.
We knew where these were in advance as we had the utilities drawings for existing utilities, but there are always services in the Highway that are not on any drawings!
The pipework was laid from the connection point and back to the site. The majority of the pipework, for about 8 metres, was in a wide parking layby. With the connection having been made at approximately 1.4m deep, it made the pipework back to the site a bit over a metre throughout, and of course becoming shallower as we worked back to the site. The carriageway and the layby had to be backfilled and made safe before we could extend our excavation into the footpath – the road was too busy for us to ask pedestrians to cross the road and use the other footpath. In advance of reinstating the carriageway and the layby, we used a ‘footpath board’ to enable pedestrians to cross our back-filled excavation in the layby, whilst we excavated in the footpath.
As usual, we found plenty of smaller utilities in the footpath, including electric cables, BT cables and ducts, and a water service pipe, all of which we had to hand-dig underneath.
The pipework was laid up to the boundary with the private property. A demarcation manhole is always required within 1 metre of the boundary with the Highway, but this was not within our remit, and the customer had already fitted this, and left a plastic 110mm spur from the demarcation manhole to the boundary, onto which we connected our clay pipework. With all pipework complete and tested, we prepared for tarmac reinstatement. We collected base course tarmac and 10mm tarmac ourselves on our own 4-wheel grab lorry and the reinstatement was completed just over a week after we started on site.
Timeline
Time to quote for the works: Less than a week
Time taken to obtain Section 106 Licence from AW: (Our customer already had this)
Time taken to obtain Section 50 Licence from Highways: 5 weeks – included talks between us and Highways regards traffic management
Leadtime to use S50 Licence: 5 weeks
Time taken to do the work: Just over a week
Total time: 12 weeks
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