Vital infrastructure such as road and railway slopes, pipeline bedding and flood protection structures could be better monitored and maintained, thanks to a project by researchers in the UK.
In the UK alone, there are 748,000 properties with at least a 1-in-100 annual chance of flooding, while train derailment caused by slope failure is the greatest infrastructure-related risk faced by the railways.
The cost of infrastructure failures is also high, with emergency repairs costing Network Rail ten times as much as planned works, which in turn cost ten times as much as maintenance.
The £4.8m EPSRC-funded project, led by researchers at Newcastle University, is aiming to get a better understanding of the way linear infrastructure deteriorates under increasing environmental pressures, such as more extreme weather, according to project leader Dr Stephanie Glendinning, of Newcastle’s School of Civil Engineering and Geosciences.
The research programme, Assessment, Costing and enHancement of long life Long Linear Assets (ACHILLES), involves researchers from Southampton, Durham, Loughborough, Leeds and Bath Universities, plus the British Geological Survey, infrastructure owners and consultants.
“We don’t actually know which slopes are going to fail and when, so we’re trying to identify at-risk places on the network, so that they can be pre-emptively monitored and perhaps repaired,” said Glendinning.
As part of the ACHILLES project, the researchers are investigating how soil responds to cycles of wetting and drying, to understand how slopes and bedding are affected by more periods of heavy rain, for example.
The researchers have carried out preliminary work that has shown these wet and dry cycles do reduce the strength of the soil, but hope to include surface chemistry and minerology studies to investigate further, said Glendinning.
“There could be things going on in these soils that we haven’t been looking at before, which could give us a pre-cursor to failure, so that we can then go out onto the network and look for these signs,” she said.
They also hope to use information gathered by network operators, such as data from those slopes that are already equipped with instrumentation to measure water content and pressure, and soil movement, for example.
Imaging vegetation could also reveal important clues as to what is going on under the surface of the soil, while existing measurement trains used to scan the tracks could provide useful data, she said.
Modern management systems are certainly responsible for many of the poor maintenance problems. In one local large water authority the maintenance staff bonus is directly related to the money they don’t spend. This is called efficiency. It has resulted in some very expensive system failures, and public inconvenience, but the maintenance cost over many years was minimal, more money for the Australian owners. In other authorities , fortunately, the correct outlook is taken where the infra structure is regarded as an asset to be properly maintained and and improved.
“Welsh Water is owned by Glas Cymru, a single purpose company with no shareholders and is run solely for the benefit of customers. The Glas Cymru business model aims to reduce Welsh Water’s asset financing cost, the industry’s single biggest cost. Under Glas Cymru’s ownership, assets and
capital investment are financed by bonds and retained financial surpluses.”
After my meter had been read, but before sending a bill, they called to advise me I could save £25 a year, if no rainwater from my roof drains into their sewer. I somehow doubt that any profit-seeking company would have volunteered that information?! All other UK water companies are in essence parasitic on their customers and the UK economy. They serve (foreign) shareholders first.
The not-for-profit business model should be obligatory for every natural monopoly. High time Parliament enacted legislation to that effect.
The word “resilience” is being used for one of the worlds latest and biggest scams, where money is “given” to local councils for “resilience” projects in exchange for a percentage of their revenues. This looks like a propaganda story to justify such.
But the Grocer’s daughter and her ilk did exactly the reverse! and enacted legislation which sold-off the assets, owned by the state! (ie you and I?) to the very shareholders you now decry.
Perhaps the most disgraceful of her many triumphs!
Yes Mike, it’s the tragedy of our time and by selling off the family silver dirt cheap, Maggie left us with the national debt, instead of a Norway-style SWF. Ever since, the UK economy has been rich pickings for the (foreign) capitalists that can exploit our assets. Of course, nuclear wasn’t amongst them, so we now reward the Chinese and French states for retaining that special expertise.
My father was a bank manager at a time when it was an honourable profession and he knew better than to vote for Thatcher. I’ve never paid any interest to a bank, due to a wise upbringing. The old man always said mortgages were not a retail bank’s business.
I didn’t want the British Gas shares I was entitled to, but who can afford to look a gift horse in the mouth? A bonus scheme motivated the lower orders to work harder and it made economic sense. Now they get zero-hours contracts and the CEO gets a bonus for bullying the workforce.
Respect to J K Galbraith: “We can safely abandon the doctrine of the eighties, namely that the rich were not working because they had too little money, the poor because they had much.” and “The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.”