37 Looking back and looking forward

It is January, a time of looking back and looking forward. And I have just discovered the “newsletter” feature in LinkedIn. So, this is my first contribution in the new format.

I am Martin Osborne a specialist in assessing and planning urban drainage systems to deliver benefits to society such as reducing the problems of flooding and pollution. About a year ago I partially retired and to fill my time I started “The DWMP-blog” to share my ideas and experience. 

What does the title mean?

DWMP stands for Drainage and Wastewater Management Plan. It is the new approach in the UK to producing integrated, long-term strategic plans for drainage, sewerage and wastewater. The first round of plans are currently out for consultation and work is already starting on the second round due in 5 years’ time.

The story so far

I started off with a plan for about 20 episodes of The DWMP-blog, as I thought that was all that I had to say, but there are always new ideas and so far there have been 36 episodes.  Links to them all are given in the list below. Each one takes only 4 or 5 minutes to read, so if you have the time, you could read them all to see how the story unfolds. The topics vary from philosophical to geeky details of computational modelling but I have tried to make them entertaining.

1.              The background.

2.              How does a DWMP differ from a WRMP?

3.              What is the drainage and wastewater system?

4.              Do we need models?

5.              Targets; cost or value?

6.              Future uncertainty – is it what? or when?

7.              Choosing options – stepwise or optimise?

8.              Plan forwards or backwards?

9.              Minimising modelling effort?

10.           Is up-to-date the same as recently updated?

11.           Are we following the roadmap?

12.           Are we planning for imaginary flooding?

13.           How much flood risk is too much?

14.           How much overflow discharge is too much?

15.           How do we model environmental impact?

16.           No detriment – or levelling sideways.

17.           DWMPs and asset health.

18.           The significance of rainfall.

19.           Getting the message across.

20.           Methodology for Cycle 2.

21.           Did we overlook strategy?

22.           FFT, ffs.

23.           Paying for DWMPs

24.           Integrated flood risk management

25.           Back to first principles

26.           DWMPs and asset health

27.           Encouraging SuDS retrofit

28.           Reducing the risk of surface water flooding

29.           “All models are wrong but some of them are useful”

30.           How should we charge for water and sewerage services?

31.           Bistromathics and encouraging SuDS retrofit

32.           Does anyone remember critical sewers?

33.           How much runoff gets into the sewers?

34.           Revisiting present and future uncertainty

35.           Initial loss on permeable surfaces

36.           Designing for exceedance

The newsletter

The newsletter format is similar to the previous blog post format, but the posts are linked together and you can “subscribe” (its free) to the newsletter and so get a notification when I upload a new episode. Please comment, challenge, agree as much as you like and please also let others know about it as I would like my ideas to get a good airing

I have numbered this first post in the newsletter format as Episode 37 as it is very much a continuation of the previous posts.

Acknowledgements

My thinking about DWMPs and drainage planning has been influenced and challenged by many people from many different organisations and I am grateful to all of them for their insights. They are too numerous to name here, but you all know who you are, so thank you. However, the ideas set out here (including the bad ones) are my own.