New scheme at Draycote Water to avoid drought

Work has started on a new £500k scheme at Draycote reservoir in Warwickshire. 

Severn Trent’s water resources manager, Marcus O’Kane said “Despite record low rainfall over the winter period and the Environment Agency stating that parts of the region are officially in drought, we are doing everything possible to avoid restrictions for our customers this year. 

Over the last six months we have focused on moving raw water supplies across our water ‘grid’ from the wetter west to the drier east to balance out regional supplies.  

Dozens of individual measures are being taken to ensure our customers do not face any usage restrictions this year, including the scheme at Draycote”

Kate Vickers, water production manager said “The scheme at Draycote is designed to refill the reservoir ready for the coming year.  At the moment the reservoir has been effectively “switched off” and customers in the area are being supplied from Meriden.  To get water back into the reservoir one of the things we are doing is using a new pipe to take water (when river levels are high enough to allow) out of the River Leam at Willes Meadow, near Leamington Spa and pump it up to Draycote. 

We will be pumping the water a total distance of 9 miles and a height gain 50m in height.  The majority of the length will use an existing pipe which normally takes water in the opposite direction from Draycote to Leamington but we will be reversing the flow along it.   The last 800 metres is a new pipe which is currently being laid overland on site at Draycote to take water into the reservoir inlet.

We will be able to pump up to a maximum of 12.5 million litres a day into Draycote, but our average amount of water will be around 10 million litres a day.  This is a huge investment for us and is only a small part of the work that we are doing to avoid water usage restrictions this year.”

Kate added “We have done everything we can to ensure that this work can happen safely and we are pleased to say that the whole of the site will be kept open during the work to allow people to visit as normal”.