PROJECT FOCUS
Olympian effort flows through
The site for the London Olympics 2012 includes a brand new deep water pumping station – and the UK’s biggest municipal water recycling project ever. But, as Claire Smith reports, the capital’s impressive engineering history is not being forgotten
hey call them Pinky and Perky – the two giant carbon extractor pipes of the new east London pumping station – manufactured in glass reinforced plastic and finished in pink to match one of the official London 2012 brand colours. Unveiled earlier this year the deep water pumping station – which connects the newly created water and sewage extension to the existing Victorian network – embodies many of the principles of the Olympic vision.
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Rather than being designed to fade into the landscape the new pumping station is intended to become a talking point – which after the games have gone will become a landmark – and a symbol of the regeneration of one of the most deprived areas of London.
Ruari Mayback, Olympic Development Authority (ODA) project sponsor for utilities, said of the Olympic Park: “It is the project that has put the imagination and excitement back into engineering – and the utilities are the backbone of everything we do.” One of the challenges in designing for the £9.3B Olympic redevelopment is that everything must be fully up and running to cope with the huge influx of athletes, spectators and press expected to descend on London for the 2012 games. The budget comes 63% from government funding, 23% from the lottery and 13% from the Mayor of London and the London Development Agency.
During the games in July and August 2012, the Olympic Village will be home to 17,000 athletes and officials. Around 20,000 journalists, photographers and television crew from around the world will be based in the new media centre. And hundreds of thousands of spectators are expected to attend the games – 100% of whom will be arriving by public transport, cycle or by foot.
These are designed to be the greenest Olympics ever – but the plan also is to create a legacy – effectively a new area of London, with 2,800 new homes, a huge shopping centre and world class sports facilities.
Mayback says: “If you were just staging the games you would have temporary facilities. The idea for us is to look at the situation and leave a legacy for future development.”
After the games and the Paralympic Games are over, the site will revert to a building site once more as the five main stadiums are scaled down and the accommodation in the Olympic Village is converted into flats and new homes. The number of seats in the main Olympic Stadium can be reduced from 80,000 to 55,000 – enough to become the grounds for one of the smaller London football teams. The baseball court is a temporary building which can be moved. The number of seats in the Velodrome and the Aquatic Centre can also be reduced after to allow them to become useful public assets. When designing the infrastructure for the site engineers had to take into account the fact that water flow and energy consumption would peak during the games
and then fall significantly – before gradually building up again as this new district of east London begins to develop.
Ron Smith, field operation specialist from Thames Water, said: “If you are building for a town you know how many people are going to be there for a number of years. Here it is going to be very busy for a very short period of time. The future is unpredictable and you have to build that into the plant – so some of the pipes can be converted to dry weather channels when things become less busy.”
Engineers working on the site decided to divide the development into stages – two years planning, four years building and one year of testing. Work began on the new sewage system in June 2008. Across the 2km site two km of
14 Water & Wastewater Treatment December 2010
Engineers have named two bright pink carbon extractor pipes at the Olympic Park Pumping Station ‘Pinky and Perky’. The installation will help collect, convey and discharge foul waste from the main venues and buildings in the Olympic Park during the games and from the legacy venues and residential developments after 2012; embossed images on the concrete exterior of the Olympic Park Pumping Station are taken from the Victorian designs for Abbey Mills Pumping Station
new 1.2m-diametre pipe has been laid, as well as a network of secondary pipes. The Olympic Park is the first to be built with a permanent connection to the sewer network. Smith is one of Thames tunnelling experts and supervised the creation of the new network – created by remotely operated tunnelling
machines named after famous female Olympic athletes. The main sewer runs from the velodrome at the head of the park to a new pumping station which propels the wastewater and effluent up from the low lying site upwards so that it can flow into the gravity led Victorian system.
The new sewer network had to negotiate four rivers, two watercourses and two operational railway lines. The first part of the work was decontaminating the site, which had been used for various industrial purposes. Developing the site which contains areas of marsh and wetland also involved building 30 new bridges. Planners also had to negotiate with four different local authorities – Tower Hamlets,
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