Thames Tideway Scheme

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Thames Tideway Scheme is an infrastructure project intended to improve the capacity of London’s sewerage system and prevent sewage overflows into the River Thames as it flows through London.

The project has been devised by the Thames Tideway Study Group, which comprises Thames Water, the Environment Agency, DEFRA and the Greater London Authority, building on ideas for a combined sewer overflow tunnel first proposed by Thames Water in the early 1990s.

Proposals include a wide diameter storage-and-transfer tunnel (internal diameters of 7.2 m and 9 m have been suggested), 22 miles (35 km) long, underneath the riverbed of the Thames between Hammersmith in the west and Beckton/Crossness in the east,^[1]^[2] but as the cost of such a megaproject is likely to be substantial (estimated at £1.7 billion in 2004), no firm investment decisions have yet been made.

As design and construction of such a tunnel would also take an estimated 15 years, a shorter-term (and slightly lower cost) interim solution has also been developed. This £1.6 billion (2006 prices) involves two shorter tunnels, one taking storm water from Hammersmith to Battersea for treatment or storage, the other carrying water from Abbey Mills south to the river at Beckton, and improvements to associated treatment facilities. The Abbey Mills scheme would also reduce the likelihood of sewage overflows marring the staging of the 2012 Summer Olympics at nearby Stratford.