Wonderful Homes Limited

Today we’re on site with drainage specialists, Lanes Group Plc, in Hixon, Staffordshire, in what is currently a farmers field, where we will soon start the construction of 30 new homes for one of the Midlands leading Housing Associations. 

This is a classic example of a site that on the surface looks very straight forward but in reality is far from it! It’s been a farmers field for 100’s of years, so it would be very easy to assume little or no abnormal / site remediation issues & costs. However, the site has a fairly steep slope across it, far more than you would think looking at it from the road, which is going to require major earthmoving works to achieve acceptable gradients for the road, drives & paths. As a result there will then need to be retaining walls and banks and land drainage to deal with storm water run-off from the adjacent fields. Piling is also required across the site.  On top of this we have the issues we are here to survey today; We have a culverted stream running across one corner of the site and an adopted (although disused) foul sewer running straight through the middle. The Culvert we plan to use as part of our land drainage strategy and the existing sewer will be diverted and incorporated into the new foul sewers we will be constructing.

Today we’ve had to excavate to gain access to the culvert and sewer, then clear the pipes using a high pressure water jetting rig so that we can CCTV survey them. The objective of the day being to establish if the pipes are fit for our proposed drainage strategy and whether any repairs are required. 

I must finish by giving thanks to the guys from Lanes Group Plc that were with us today. They were extremely helpful and were grafting on site for over 9 hours, with a fairly long drive back home to Nottingham on a Friday evening to top the day off! 

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