Restoring site access: Securing dewatering permits at a former power station
Harworth EstatesLeeds, UK
When our client identified that recent regulatory changes had created gaps in their permitting strategy for dewatering a large basement at a former coal-fired power station near Leeds, Envireau stepped in to secure the necessary applications and permits while keeping the development on track.
Challenge
Recent changes to regulatory requirements had caught the developer off guard, leaving them without the abstraction licence or discharge permit needed to dewater the basement. With technical work still to be done and applications yet to go in, the project was at risk of stalling while everything was put in place
Approach
Our team knows the regulator well, and that experience helped us find a practical way forward while the applications sat in the queue for determination. We teamed up with our sister company, RSK Geosciences, to carry out a thorough ground investigation, which fed into a Hydrogeological Impact Assessment (HIA) looking at how the dewatering would affect the surrounding water environment, along with an H1 risk assessment to check the impact on river quality.
Alongside this, we worked with the regulator to agree local arrangements that allowed some abstraction and discharge to continue while the formal applications made their way through the system.
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Name Surname, Job Role
Outcome
The HIA and H1 assessments showed the impacts were negligible, giving us a strong technical case to put forward to the Environment Agency in support of the applications.
This helped minimise the time it took to get the necessary authorisation, while finding a way for key parts of the development to carry on in the meantime — keeping things moving for our client when it mattered most.
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