Beach Road Water Supply Tower Dismantled!

Regular readers of the blog will remember that the water tower located at the end of Wall Street which was to boost pressure to Beach Road properties on the seaward side of the sea wall had rusted to an unsafe state which concerned several residents in terms of Health & Safety, especially with 6-12 year old children playing near it regularly which was first noticed in the blog posting here

Our Wall Street Sewage Committee Management team, democratically elected of course by a majority of residents several months ago have been also reluctant to work in the sewage shed for the same reasons cited.

This impasse led recently following the recent rains to the sewage system failing to work adequately in terms of flow rate as the sewage outlet mono pump failed and needed maintenance work carried out upon it to get it going again to reduce the levels. This was reported to all residents several weeks ago and they were informed of the situation. As this failed several weeks ago during a dry period, it caused no problem, as tanks 1 & 2 were still very low and the team decided that it could be left until Guy's men decommissioned and removed the tank, which they had already planned to do as the water infrastructure work continued at their project schedule.

Unfortunately the recent heavy rains and due to an increased amount of residents during the period compared to last year - this week it caused a lot of sewage to back up to high levels in the road manholes and something had to be done urgently. After some complaints, and angry exchanges from certain neighbours whose properties form a lower junction point to receive sewage flow from other properties before it joins the main pipe along the road started to complain to us that levels were unacceptably high. The irony of the situation of course was that the person who actually was complaining the most about the system had flatly refused to pay a fair share towards maintenance costs over the last year.

This of course has annoyed the rest of the community who are paying a fair share towards costs immensely, but as much as this was extremely unfair to the majority of residents, it does affect fully paid up users of the system. After the usual inter-road gossip, negativity and non-constructive ill-informed non technical discussions across fences - the more rational active and technically minded members and the elected management team actually started to think about a sensible solution to the complexity of the situation.

Following a lot of heated emails and verbal exchanges, which damaged already terse relationships between the single household and the rest of the community - our efforts to use this situation to accellerate the current Beach Road water infrastructure work achieved a suitable mutually acceptable solution for all parties.

So I'm very glad to say and report that Guy Smith brilliantly realised our desperation and difficulty that was threatening our community in Wall Street and promptly organised his men rapidly over the last 2 days despite being very busy with harvesting first bypassing then removing the dilapidated tower today so that work on the sewage system in Wall Street could re-commence.

A good result for everyone concerned, and Andy Haynes and I (as I've taken a day off work today) immediately took the opportunity to re-enter the sewage shed and started work looking at what was needed for the pump maintenance, he will report back to the committee and inform us of any parts that are required to get the pump working again, so we can reduce levels in the system asap and we will then inform residents of the work done in the usual way after consulting with the committee.

We'd like to thank Guy for all his efforts, something I of course did personally in a meeting with him earlier today, where I reassured him that it was another step towards positive communal cooperation.