[Music]
hello and welcome to technically speaking a podcast where scientists and engineers come together to trust about common interest share some knowledge and satisfy some curiosity i'm amina and i'm joined by ralia laura and rueda to talk about whether we adapt to infrastructure or the infrastructure adapt to us with the focus on the water industry so to start off with alia why do you care about how the water industry adapts to us well i work in the water and wastewater industry which is
actually to be honest something i kind of accidentally fell into um i didn't really like anything else in my course at university and um but i kind of enjoyed the water park just because it it felt a bit more interdisciplinary um but i'm really lucky in that sense because i kind of found my passion and i'm really really happy that i've kind of made a career out of this and so the reason why i'm interested in understanding infrastructure and our relationship with it is because
i see the future and our future challenges um and i don't think we can address those challenges without kind of getting everyone on board and understanding their relationship with the infrastructure around them so i think i've kind of given my position away already in this podcast but that's why i'm quite keen in this in this area it gives you the chance to look at the bigger picture i guess and i i suppose not many industries allow you to do that rewa why do you care about the water industry
well it does affect our day-to-day life and the quality of drinking water would be changing from a place to another so uh one example from my personal life in the uk so the water in manchester uh area was different to the new area i moved to so it's different from the water in dundee and that's a question to guardia why the water test differently in these new like in the same country but in different areas um did you want to give our trade secrets away i don't think you can do that no
i'm joking um it's um it's really just depends on the source of water so i'm not sure what the source of water is like in dundee but it might be from the highlands or from springs and it really depends on the quality but it also depends on what you like to taste so someone else might have the opposite feelings towards water so it really depends on where we get our water from but depend on your palette isn't it yeah exactly yeah maybe some people like metallic tastes i'm not sure
i can vouch for that i have some relatives from down south who prefer the water from down south and i cannot fathom like i just cannot pilot that at all it's like for me it's like it has to be manchester it cannot be down south that's like drinking chlorine to me i feel like there are other things in that not just not just the water [Laughter] laura why do you care yeah as rewarders pointed out the water does taste different in different parts of the country and i've moved around the uk a
fair amount in my career for various reasons um but where i live now we used to get our drinking water from local lake and adele water and then someone discovered some rare mussels in it that we were not meant to disturb so we had to stop extracting water from that lake so the water company it currently tops our water supply up with borehole water which a lot of people say makes the water taste unpleasant i haven't noticed personally and there's a plan for a couple years
down the line to have pipe work coming in all the way from filming which is quite a long way away coming all the way around the mountains to get water to us because we can't abstract water from annadale and that's a huge engineering challenge it's also quite interesting to see the effect it has on the local community as well as the massive disruption just getting pipe work here from a reservoir that's quite a long way away just with the discovery of a few muscles
so that's quite interesting that how everything around that water supply now has to change because of what's been discovered that also highlights how the water industry is regulated as well isn't that how they've got rules and regulations and how they must adapt to the environment they're in okay so we've got some idea of why water infrastructure is important looking at during the pandemic and seeing how our water uses has changed especially because we have to wash our hands all the time now
or perhaps more so than than used to there's still 785 million people out there who cannot access clean water so this is clearly not an option for everyone and clean water to sort of drink and and bathe yourselves with and and wash yourselves it's it's not a luxury that everybody has in the uk and abroad different quality of water reaches our homes in the uk we can drink water from the taps which is directly from the treatment works grey water is using water from the likes
of showering and reusing it within the building for areas that don't require clean water such as toilets etcetera capturing rain water is also a possibility and can be used to water gardens so there are different technologies out there but we are lagging in a bit of implementation over there so how has your home user changed during the pandemic laura i suspect that our water use in some ways it probably went up initially because um i showered at work a lot i wasn't home a
lot anyway because i was traveling a fair bit for work um whereas now i have to shower at home so i don't have anywhere else to go i've also started showering less which i think for what i see on social media is quite true of a lot of people because you're not going out as much you must possibly not getting as much exercise um i'm worried this is turning into like a an insight into our hygiene habits actually i feel like this is the direction of this podcast yeah remember maybe we should change
topics slightly we also make more cups of tea following on from our last episode so all the tea that we would normally drink in the office we now drink at home so i suspect our water use overall has probably gone up but we did also install a water butt for the garden so we're now not watering the garden with drinking water unless the water butter runs dry which it hasn't done yet my youngest figured out a way to empty the water but so we have two in the house and it was
really good before but now she just sort of crawls out and just turns the tap on and just sits there and plays for that so i try how about you lalia i would say that my water habit has definitely changed usually i'd wake up and have a shower and then go off to work now i have a shower i don't know maybe like 11 a.m or you know just before lunch or something like it really does vary and i think that um yeah because i'm at home more often i normally would for example cook later
on in the evening whilst now i'm like maybe i'll do something fancy and have something on the oven for like the whole day um and so the times in which i use water i think has changed a lot previously my my flight wouldn't have seen me in the house let alone the water tap to see me so yeah i'd say that the timing of which i've used the water at least has changed rather than the quantity definitely and how about you rather basically lots of the habit have changed like from having
being been in the office so let's say well in terms of hygiene since we're mentioning that so toilet we're using just more toilets now in the house rather than having that office space as well also like cooking habit as they mentioned and tea and coffee so i do drink quite a bit of tea and i used to drink that tea in in the office now all that tea has changed into being at home and trying to stay awake during your zoom calls yeah long long zone calls requires quite a bit of teeth
as everyone will remember we had glorious weather during the beginning of lockdown so how did that affect the infrastructure so we usually plan our infrastructure based on our current understanding so current population size our current habits and then what we think the future would look like so there's a lot of crystal ball kind of thinking so what we predict in terms of our population growth or possibly shrinkage and projected habits and we do build in some resilience and so we look at
events like a one and two hundred year drought so what does that look like and can our infrastructure kind of handle that so overnight we had covet and we all had to stay at home so generally our water habits changed but i was talking about having a shower of random times laura apparently has less showers now um and her weight is drinking tea today awake museum course so our habits and the timing in which we use water changed pre-covered there was like a there's a choreograph of like
the the energy companies and the water companies all working side by side to make sure that we get water when we need it on time and that changed and then if you kind of link that to a hot and dry situation we really did see a massive fall in our ability to meet the demand so because of this we saw a lot of pipe bursts it does reduce the pressure in our network and so people would have seen a reduction in the pressure and in some cases a pipe burst means absolutely no
water for certain areas and that's really disruptive in terms of our ability to use water a given time but also a burst usually means a road is out of use for a while but i want to kind of ask you guys actually do you think there's an onus on us as a paying customer to look at our water habits and be like you know what we're in a bit of a dry spell do you think we should reduce our water uh demand or do you think that's solely for engineers and scientists to go figure out i think
there should be a joint thing that water authority starts doing survey so the customer could tip in and say like well look that's what we think and the scientists and engineers could use this information to redirect it it's not something i ever really thought about i guess i suppose because we're quite a privileged nation where we normally have water there all the time it's perfectly safe drinking water even though a lot of people probably don't drink water that's come
directly out of the tap so i feel like there should be more of an emphasis on how privileged we are and therefore what more we should consider about how we use just resources in general but i guess it's also it's not a question we've had to ask ourselves i think that's a really good point actually we often kind of get annoyed that oh no you know why can't we water our garden it's a scarce resource and because we're paying for this i think there's a there's an idea that
we should be able to get the service as and when and there is some responsibility on on our sciences and engineers and the infrastructure community at large to kind of understand and predict what's going to change and what's going to happen and how to make sure that we're resilient but um i do think it's a dance that everyone needs to dance to there are positive stories covered too there were some scientists who worked out a way to monitor kobit in our sewage system so that they could
identify particular hot spots and that information was then used to help prevent spread of covert in some areas so scientists do and engineers do kind of try and work to adapt that's definitely expressing their adaptation isn't it because the pandemic came overnight exactly the good stories are often not brought out as much as they should it was definitely hard work to mobilize people and understand how we could monitor kobe through a sewage system is not a pretty story to tell
it does show that you know we can adapt but at the same time it's a conversation with the paying customers we can adapt but also could you also kind of help us out kind of conversation it's not an easy conversation to have because you are paying for it it's like when you go and buy like i don't know when the waiter goes and buys a kind of coke she doesn't expect anything except to just drink her cook right she doesn't expect any kind of other things to consider so it's a weird
weird way of thinking about it i guess i feel like this ties in with our zero carbon outlook because it is resources that we're using and it's scarce resources like he said and and there's a lot of infrastructure that goes into planning all of this and and no water should be wasted it is something which is precious and we are really privileged to be able to have water on demand whenever we want 24 7. i feel like it's everybody's responsibility to just be sensible about
everything if you don't need a light on turn it off and if you don't need to have a half an hour shower then you know just make it a bit shorter like i don't know to me it seems like it's just something that everyone should be doing as a responsible human out of curiosity about the gray water is it reused water or less filtered water spray water is often the water used in a building and it's instead of going straight into a treatment work it stays within the
premise of the building and you can just use it for them to like flush your toilets not everything can go into grey water your shower water for example could be used as grey water but things from the sink often are not because people put things on the sink that you don't really want to kind of reuse at all so that's what that's what grey water is i think linking back to amina though i think that brings us to how responsible and conscious we want to be as a human race and i know we
were talking about you know the water that literally comes from our tats but if we if we kind of look further afield and understand the discussion kind of more globally then our habits generally so be it um fashion or our food habits they really really significantly affect water resources around the world and so we you i know you mentioned like a carbon footprint and there's like a water footprint too and if we want to ensure that we're conscious responsible humans
then we have to understand how scarce our natural resources are and our infrastructure can be resilient but i guess it's a point of do we want to make it over resilient that the privileged few i guess can have anything whatever they want or is it a case that actually you know we need to go back to the drawing board and and and talk about actually you know how sustainable is this and how far is this there are there are many stories and reports of you know when
avocado became a big thing parts of the world saw such a depletion in their water resources that locals couldn't actually get and have access to to kind of just adequate water for their own water supply so you know we could build infrastructure to make sure that you know everyone in london and manchester and dundee et cetera get everything whenever they want but it's a wider discussion i guess on that so a holistic approach is very important do you think there are areas where the water industry
could be improved because like one of the things you hear a lot is there a lot of leaks in the system which costs an awful lot of either money or resource and but it would also be prohibited to try and fix them as well so we just kind of live with it it's not an either or it's a kind of a combination of both there's an argument that says you know what it's not too bad if pipes leak because they'll kind of go back into our ground water exhaust and eventually we'll we can like pick it up later
but then it kind of questions well you know a lot of energy went into cleaning that water is that really a good use of use for energy it's a really energy intensive process treating water and wastewater historically actually treating water usually would happen at parts of the day where the energy would be cheapest but obviously kobe meant that changed as well so our energy habits changed so they're all quite interlinked all these different sectors but there is a lot more that the
water companies could do and i guess it's kind of encouraging that kind of innovation and encouraging work in areas that we've historically found quite difficult like identifying leakages can we not find out where our pipe is leaking apparently it's not that easy do you guys go off where there's a leakage and then follow it backward or is like non-destructive testing used how is it generally figured out so we have flow monitors at different parts of the network and so you
you know how much water is going in a particular part and then if you know that you know no water's actually been taken out during that kind of stretch but there's a reduction in the in the flow at one point then you know that there's a leakage somewhere but with that wear within that system that's a that's another that's another that's another point there are non-destructive ways of monitoring that but i'll be very honest we're not even always entirely sure where our
pipework is uh so actually going to the streets and trying to work out where these pipes exist isn't actually well documented and so that in itself like actually knowing what our assets are underground not even just for water just um from for a lot of assets in the ground gas and there's so many times on engineering projects you'll hear of a strike which means that you know we've kind of done some ground investigations we have a rough idea where these pipes are
and then we go and start working and then we hit a pipe and then it's like oh and then it's all it's very expensive you have to go back to the drawing board look at um like diversions and and the compensations that you'd have to give to all these different people that you've hit their pipes is that because some of the systems are quite old like for example i know manchester has water that comes also from film so the same lake i'll eventually get my water from reservoir i should say
um but that was sort of a victorian era and it it falls all the way under gravity all the way to manchester through this big tunnel i think and that's what 100 years old yeah exactly so our our infrastructure is quite old and we didn't actually kind of map them out all the time sometimes we map them out but they were done on on just like paper and that then wasn't kind of transcribed into what we currently use what's also quite interesting is that the water industry
for example uses one particular software to map where their pipe worker are but that's not necessarily the same software that another organization would use um so everyone uses different ways of mapping out where they think their infrastructure is but it's not necessarily um it's not so it's necessarily easy to to kind of get more of a holistic understanding of what's underground i would never have guessed that coming from the industry that i'm in where everything is done so meticulously
i guess you guys are really up against it so if we go back to the question of whether the infrastructure adapts to us or whether we adapt to the infrastructure it sounds like it's a bit of a compromise between the two we need to do both holistic approaches need to be taken it's not a simple answer you need to look at the bigger picture so we hope that you enjoyed our discussion thank you very much the views expressed in this podcast belong entirely to the person that said
them they do not represent any industry or organization if you enjoyed listening to these views it would really help us out if you could rate us leave a review and tell a friend this podcast was sponsored by no one but if you're interested in funding us to continue to have frank discussions about science and engineering please get in [Music] touch