Ryde Esplanade works: why did the sewer at Appley fail?

In January 2021, a small hole appeared in a pathway above the sewer and Southern Water started work to repair it.

This turned into a colossal engineering project which is only now coming to an end. At one point dozens of tankers were shuttling back and forth ferrying an entire town’s wastewater from one point to another.

A whole new temporary above-ground pumping station plus hundreds of metres of sewer was constructed. Although, impressively, most people in Ryde saw no effect on their wastewater service, this was at a huge cost in time, labour and ingenuity.

The sewer works at Appley. Picture by Matthew Chatfield.

The impact on the local area and businesses at Appley was substantial, disrupting use of one of the Island’s most popular family beaches and parks for a whole season.

So as this year-long emergency thankfully comes to a close, we can be grateful for a couple of things. How lucky that there was no significant uncontrolled spill of sewage onto the beautiful and internationally-protected Appley sands.

• Jan 2021: Ryde sinkhole means 'complex repair' by Southern Water

If the massive pipe had burst completely — as it apparently was about to do — it would have taken just a few hours to contaminate the beach for a very long time, and cause significant harm to the delicate shoreline wildlife.

That never happened at Appley. One reason for that is the second thing to be thankful for — we were not left to sort this out by ourselves.

For once I’ll confess that the Isle of Wight needed help from the mainlanders, and help was not slow to arrive. In short order there were swarms of engineers, tonnes of equipment, and fleets of vehicles all intent on fixing the issue.

No doubt there were plenty of hiccups in the process but the bottom line was that the infrastructure to control the initial emergency was available, and it was put in place fast.

But the question I cannot help but ask is why did this happen? Don’t confuse that question with ‘How did this happen?’

This incident never has been an engineering failure. It is normal and expected for infrastructure to require repair or replacement.

It is understood that much of the wastewater network on the Isle of Wight was constructed long ago and to standards that would not apply today.

So with that in mind, how much more important should it have been that the failure of the Appley sewer could have been anticipated and prevented?

This was a failure of planning, a failure at Southern Water’s strategic level, not operational. If the entire operation for Ryde’s wastewater relies upon a single pipe, why was the state of that pipe not known?

Are there other single points of failure in the network — uninspected and just waiting to fail?

With Southern Water all too regularly in the headlines these days, the resolution of this problem is a rare moment of positive news for them — but for how long?