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Thames Water’s main treatment works in London is vulnerable. Just one system failure could leave millions of Londoners without running water, according to a sobering report in the Financial Times. The influential London pink broadsheet newspaper outlines how: “Mass evacuations, with the military on standby, could be triggered in the event of a failure at the crumbling Coppermills works in north-east London.
Water outages for millions of people across the twin financial centres of Canary Wharf and the City of London could be prompted by a single fault, according to documents seen by the Financial Times. Thames Water has pledged to improve water treatment.
The fact that work to upgrade the plant is only just beginning has raised the risk of a catastrophic failure. According to the FT: “The 1960s plant in Walthamstow is on a list of 13 critical infrastructure water treatment and sewage processing sites belonging to Thames Water at risk of “single point of failure”, meaning that only one incident could disrupt supplies.”
There are growing fears that a discretion at the site could cause knock-on effects at others. The structure, which is based at Coppermills, has been described as “a low-probability, high-consequence event”. Thames Water estimates the probability of failure as a one-in-50-year event, which should raise eyebrows, certainly in the insurance community, which routinely assesses 1 in 100- or 200-year events and assigns a significant premium as a result. 1 in 50-year events would attract a much larger insurance premium.
Sir Jon Cunliffe, a former deputy governor of the Bank of England, described “a patch and mend approach” in his independent review into the water sector in July. Awareness of single point of failure perils for infrastructure assets has grown since power outages at Heathrow and Spain this year where large parts of the electricity grid failed.
The FT reports that: “the potential scale of any outage at Coppermills is so large that people may need to be evacuated from their homes, with the military on standby.”
Single points of potential failure like this can have cascading ripple effects that ripple across industries – a clear example of connected risk in effect.
