A key piece of engineering on a £120m water mains improvement project that entailed diverting a river in East Ayrshire to enable the pipe to be installed has just been completed by Scottish Water.
The project will benefit in excess of 200,000 individuals and businesses in parts of East Renfrewshire as well as in much of Ayrshire. To do this though, contractors needed to divert a short stretch of the Craufurdland Water near Kilmarnock so that they would be able to install the water main beneath the river bed.
The work took about five days to complete and involved allowing an approximate 60 metre stretch of the permanent riverbed in countryside near Craufurdland Castle to run dry in order for them to excavate and install the 900mm steel pipeline under dry conditions while at the same time not preventing the river from flowing completely, but allowing it and its inhabitants to continue flowing downstream comparatively uninterrupted.
The project involved the excavation of a temporary channel wide enough and deep enough to carry the volume of water that naturally flows along the watercourse. Plastic sheeting was used to line the channel to prevent siltation of the downstream watercourse as well as to prevent the banks scouring away.
One tonne builders’ bulk bags filled with gravel and straw bales were used as barriers to redirect the watercourse in to the newly excavated channel, enabling the water flow to bypass the working area.
The Ayrshire Rivers Trust (ART), who was engaged by Scottish Water to carry out ecology screening of watercourses where the pipeline crosses through them, identified the watercourse as significant and well-stocked.
This project is part of Scottish Water’s water supply network improvements that will see 30 miles of new water mains installed to connect the system in Ayrshire with the Greater Glasgow area’s network. The construction of the new strategic water main is expected to be completed in 2020.
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