Wee Notes & Breaking News
These are William’s notes and comments as the year progresses.
Himalayan Balsam - the root of the problem
At the start of Queen Victoria’s reign Himalayan Balsam was introduced as a garden plant. Having escaped the garden the plant is now impacting and out-competing native species in our wetland areas and thus it is affecting native insects, animals and birds. It is listed under Schedule 9 of the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981 and it forms part of our check when carrying out a Stage 1 site investigation for any site. All our staff are trained in its identification along with other such plants as Japanese Knotweed and Giant Hogweed.
Last Friday we closed the office and joined the RSPB at Lochwinnoch to clear areas of the Himalayan Balsam - part of our ongoing efforts to improve the environment and help local communities and organisations. On Friday the weather stood fair and a good time was had by all.
Hard Hat Talks from Block Architects.
A few weeks ago I was invited by Kenneth Martin of Block Architects to take part in his ‘Hard Hat Talks’. These interesting pieces aim to be ‘No Fluff. Just Real Industry Conversations’ and entail a chat between Kenneth and a guest.
Episode 3: Flood Defence to Land Restoration is now out and I invite you to have a look and listen.
The Hard Hat Talks Podcast - Real Discussions Shaping the Industry
Free Lunch!
They say that there is no such thing as a free lunch and, depending on who you ask in Terrenus, I may agree with you. On a regular basis we have ‘Lunch and Learns’ where for the chance of food we meet and learn from one of our own about a technical subject. This week we are having no less that two events - the first was today and concerned WAT-PS-10-02. This may not mean much to many people but if you are considering developing a Brownfield site you should get to know it. SEPA has updated its guidance on the assessment of groundwater and this will have big impacts. I will post an in-depth briefing soon so watch this space.
The second meet will be about SMART decision making - I think that we are going to need a bigger pizza.
Off to site.
One of the prices of seniority in any organisation is that you reduce the opportunity to get out and do some of the things that drew you to the job in the first place. Some of my fondest memories at work were in the early days with a van going round the country organising and managing multiple site investigations. If you play your cards right you can use the travel as ‘downtime’ where you listen to the radio and more or less relax. True, the downside is that your office is the steamed up van on a wet day when your note book has turned to mush and the borehole location drawing looks like something regurgitated by the nearby cow but the pleasure is real none-the-less.
This week I have the chance to undertake a wee sojourn to Wigtownshire for a site walk over in preparation for a 2D fluvial hydraulic model. The development is for glamping pods on land which, presently, the SEPA Flood Map indicates possible flooding. Our hydraulic models are more accurate that the SEPA ones (due to them being site specific) and our aim is to allow the development to proceed safely, free from the risk of flooding and without increasing the risk elsewhere. Without our input the job will simply not go ahead although we still need our client to be flexible regarding the site layout - the motto is “get us involved even before you get the architect involved”.
So, being somewhat rusty, today I am now getting briefed by our Jonny Simpson in the use of our survey staff which will allow us to ‘truth’ the local LiDAR dataset which will form the basis of our hydraulic model.
More of the site visit next week perhaps.
BIG Data for a Small Country
Last week, we had meetings with a firm who carry out drone surveys. I may have mentioned previously that we in Terrenus use available LiDAR data in many parts of our work. This ‘Light Detection and Ranging’ type of data is essential for all of the detailed flood risk assessments that we carry out - providing a key part of the model inputs. Good quality information is available from Government - Scottish Remote Sensing Portal, at least in the Central Belt, however, in many other parts of the country, the data is patchy and we are currently investigating commissioning our own surveys to improve our hydraulic models.
A good way of looking at this type of LiDAR data is to login to the SEPA Flood Map. There you will see (below) that the fluvial risk analysis is more ‘blocky’ than the surface water risk analysis, due to the SEPA surface water modelling being more recent than the fluvial modelling. In both cases however, the SEPA models are a compromise which (amongst other reasons) is why you cannot depend on them for Planning purposes. Any bespoke consultants model will (or should) use refined datasets and more detailed knowledge of the site in order to provide a much better understanding of flood risk for a particular site.
The upshot is that, if you want or need to challenge the SEPA data (as you often do for Planning approval) you will need a more accurate model that SEPA provides. At Terrenus we take pride in doing just that.
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