Shropshire water plant upgrade will create 50 jobs
A water treatment plant in Shropshire is undergoing a £54 million upgrade that will create 50 jobs while work is being carried out.
United Utilities is carrying out the work at the water treatment plant in Oswestry, which supplies most of Liverpool and parts of Cheshire.
The original works became operational in 1892 and have never stopped since then. But engineers now plan to transform the Victorian plant into one suitable for the 21st century.
Project manager Graham Callanan from C2V+, which has been awarded the contract to work on the plant, said: "The works involve basically upgrading and modernising the existing old Victorian Oswestry water networks and the intention is to preserve drinking water for future generations and to make it more efficient and also to make it environmentally friendly in a population expansion."
The water supply starts its journey 18 miles away at Lake Vyrnwy, where it then flows into a holding reservoir at Llanforda before it is treated at Oswestry then travelling by gravity a further 50 miles to Prescot reservoir in Liverpool.
New technology which will be installed at the plant will allow engineers to retire the existing 23 slow sand filter beds, and will allow 210 million litres of water a day to be treated for customers.
Two hydro-turbines will also produce enough energy to power the site, with the daily surplus being sent into the National Grid.
Danny Brennan, United Utilities project manager, said: "This is a flagship scheme for us, modernising one of our most important treatment works in the North West, which supplies almost a million customers in Liverpool and Cheshire.
"It's also a really special project. We're redesigning a plant built by the engineers of yesteryear for our customers of the future.
"The works will continue to treat and clean water well into the next century."
Last year United Utilities began a programme of refurbishment on the 130-year-old trunk main pipes that run from Lake Vyrnwy to the Oswestry Water Treatment Works and on to Liverpool.
The refurbishment scheme has already seen contractors clean about 44km of Line 3 – a bitumen-lined steel main that was laid in the 1930s and 1940s – using specialist high pressure jets.
And they have lined the section of Lines 1 and 2, which were constructed as unlined cast iron mains in the 1890s, that run between Oswestry and Liverpool.
The refurbishment was prompted by iron and manganese deposits in the water supplied from Oswestry water treatment works and the risk of internal corrosion in the unlined cast iron mains.
