4:30pm Friday 9th January 2009
By Peter Law
HAMPSHIRE’S drinking supplies will need to be topped up with millions of litres of recycled sewage water within two decades, the Daily Echo can reveal.
The £55m scheme is outlined in a startling new report that warns the county is heading for a major water shortage.
Taps will run dry by 2030 if millions of pounds is not invested in creating new water sources, according to a report commissioned by the powerful body charged with setting out a vision for the region’s future development.
Other schemes include building a desalination plant at Fawley, which would turn seawater into tap water.
Towing icebergs from the Arctic to the Hampshire coast was among the most extreme measures touted by water chiefs to solve emergency shortages.
The impending crisis has come to a head because the water companies have been told they must dramatically reduce how much water they take from the River Itchen in dry summers.
One of the preferred solutions is to “top up” the Itchen with treated effluent water.
Under the plan, water partially cleaned at the Portswood Wastewater Treatment Works would be pumped about three miles north and released into the river at Gaters Mill in West End.
Consultants Atkins said it would increase river flows and provide additional water downstream to be abstracted and used for public supply.
This already happens at the Chickenhall Wastewater Treatment Works, in Eastleigh, where recycled water is abstracted by Portsmouth Water a short distance downstream and then purified.
However, most effluent water is currently flushed out into estuaries and then the sea.
Water experts insist recycled water is safe to drink, but the drastic scheme has already caused a stink with the Environment Agency (EA).
The EA’s Hampshire and Isle of Wight water resources manager Rod Murchie said pumping more effluent water into the Itchen could damage its ecology.
“We think the Itchen is taking as much effluent as it can handle and treating even more effluent would also require a huge energy output, which goes against what we are trying to achieve,” he said.
The recycled wastewater plan was one of seven preferred options outlined in the South Hampshire Integrated Water Management Strategy, commissioned by the Partnership for Urban South Hampshire (PUSH).
The 256-page document says that up to £220m must be spent on new water sources to meet a shortfall of up to 125 million litres a day by 2030.
Other preferred schemes include increasing the capacity of the treatment works at Testwood and a new winter storage reservoir at Havant Thicket.
The Isle of Wight would also become self-sufficient by developing its own wastewater recycling system at Sandown.
However Meyrick Gough, water resource and planning manager at Southern Water, yesterday said that since the production of the PUSH report further studies had drawn up a new list of preferred solutions.
These include universal metering, infrastructure improvements and augmenting the flows in the river, when they are very low, with groundwater sources.
Mr Murchie said lengthy discussions with Southern Water and Portsmouth Water were ongoing and a final list of preferred new water source options would be revealed when the water companies publish their final business plans in April.
See today's Daily Echo for the full story.
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