Arup and Edmund Nuttall Limited have jointly been awarded one of the first CEEQUAL awards at the recent Institution of Civil Engineers annual conference in Belfast, for their work on the Environment Agency design and build project to alleviate flooding in Wakefield, UK.
The Civil Engineering Environmental Quality and Assessment Scheme (CEEQUAL) rewards projects for high environmental quality, sustainability in design, and for best practice in construction. It has have been developed by a industry wide project advisory group led by the Institution of Civil Engineers with financial support from the Department of Trade & Industry’s ‘Partners in Innovation’.
Projects are graded with a pass, good, very good or excellent, so that the CEEQUAL awards provide a standard to compare and benchmark civil engineering projects and to raise environmental performance across the industry.
More than 40 industry partners have been involved in the trial and pilot phase of the award, and the Excellent rating given to Arup/Nuttall, is one of the first of the pilots to be publicly assessed.
The award-winning first phase of the Wakefield flood alleviation scheme was commissioned by the Environment Agency (EA) in response to repeated flooding of the city by the river Calder. It is one of five schemes awarded to Arup and Nuttall to alleviate flooding in the north of England.
The EA invested US$11.1M into the first phase of a scheme that would be sympathetic to the town’s local environment, and to this end the Arup/ Nuttall team adopted various measures to resolve environmental, heritage and amenity issues. The scheme protects more than 1000 properties and major infrastructure.
The works comprise 10km of flood defences through Wakefield and the creation of upstream flood storage reservoirs or ‘washlands’.
The washlands create recreational and habitat improvements.