Carran Hill Water Treatment Works

 

In August 2006, Northern Ireland Water commissioned its new £10 million Carran Hill Water Treatment Works – eight weeks ahead of schedule and within budget. This design and build project encompasses the entire rationale of the Achieving Excellence programme and exemplifies the benefits to be gained of adopting ‘lean thinking’ modern construction techniques.  


In recognition of its environmental efforts, the Carran Hill project has recently been awarded ‘Excellent’ status in the Whole Project Category of the 2006 CEEQUAL Awards for excellence in civil engineering.

Project background

Carran Hill Water Treatment Works is situated on the outskirts of Crossmaglen in County Armagh. The works treats water from nearby Lough Ross, which historically has been plagued with algae problems. The existing works was reaching the end of its useful life and was struggling to deal with the level of algae produced during the warmer summer months.


In November 2004, the joint venture partnership of Farrans (Construction) Ltd and Earth Tech Engineering was awarded a £10m contract to construct a modern new treatment works that would produce high quality drinking water in line with the latest EU directives.

 

A population of approximately 20,000 customers from Crossmaglen, County Armagh and the surrounding area will benefit from the water supplied by the new Works.  In fact, Carran Hill will have the capacity to supply up to 6.8million litres of water a day to the local area.

 

Environmentally-friendly Design

From the outset of its design, the new Carran Hill Works was conceived as an environmentally-conscious addition to the water infrastructure in Northern Ireland. Recycling was the key theme in developing a treatment process for the Works with recycled building products and ‘lean-thinking’ techniques used to lower wastage levels in the design, construction and commissioning of the new Water Treatment Works.

 

The Works has been designed to be as aesthetically pleasing as possible, fitting into its environment with curved roofs and green cladding. After consultation with The Ulster Wildlife Trust, an otter holt has also been installed at the pumping station of the Works which was another significant contributing factor in the winning of the CEEQUAL Award. 

 

The Works also boasts impressive state-of-the-art technology harnessing motor control centres to control equipment as well as touch screen systems.  This enables to the Works’ Operators to manage and monitor the process at a simple touch of the screens.

 

The works utilises a robust four-stage treatment process. Extensive on line water quality instrumentation has been incorporated into the design to monitor and control the plant to allow the plant to run automatically and with minimum operator intervention. The plant status is available via PC monitoring terminals located in the plant control room, with group and common alarms available for transfer to a telemetry station giving remote access and control of the plant.

 

Summary

The open book partnering approach adopted by the team, through the fostering of good relationships with key strategic and local suppliers, is clearly one of the major factors why this project has proved to be such a success.

 

This form of collaborative working with all parties - instilled from initial design to delivery phase - combined with the innovative use of supply chain initiatives, theory of constraints planning, open book accounting, performance benchmarking and continuous improvement methods, has ensured that the best value solution for Northern Ireland Water has been obtained.


Carran Hill boasts impressive state-of-the-art technology as well intergrating into the natural environment.