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Disruptive Desmoulin's responsible for £7m pipeline





A meeting heard last week that the 18.5km long pipeline was built to protect the habitat of the rare Desmoulin’s whorl snail (Vertigo moulinsiana), which is protected under the European Union’s Habitats Directive.
During the 1990s, the snail was responsible for a legal row during the planning and construction of one of the country's most controversial roads - the Newbury bypass - as the route contained an escargatoire of the mollusc. Evetually they were moved to specially-constructed ‘translcoation site’ at a nearby location.
Chris Rochfort, principal environment advisor at Optimise, the contractor carrying out the work on behalf of Thames Water, told residents at a meeting hosted by Cold Ash Greening that: “Thames Water’s abstraction at Speen was taking out a volume of water that could have an adverse impact to the snails habitat. The Environment Agency told Thames Water to reduce this by five million litres a day and that they had to find an alternative source for the water.”
He added that while the snails had been a driving force for the project there was a general issue with infrastructure in Newbury in part owing to the intended 2,000 home development at Sandleford.
Work on the pipeline, stretching between Fobney water treatment works in Reading to the Cold Ash storage reservoir, started in January this year.
Mr Rochfort explained that a direct route for the pipeline from Reading faced a number of problems as it had to avoid Theale Golf Course, the Englefield Estate, Bradfield College, Bucklebury Farm Park and ancient woodland in the district.
He said: “We had to avoid sites like that otherwise the cost of the project would have been too great.”
At one stage, discussions were held about potentially burrowing under the Iron Age hill fort at Grimsbury but Mr Rochfort explained that planning permission and an environmental impact study would have been required, which would have added a six figure sum to the project and delayed it by a year.
Avoiding the fort resulted in disruption to traffic in Slanting Hill and Station Road in Cold Ash and Hermitage, combined with rolling road closures in Marlston and Bucklebury.
“We decided it was probably best to avoid it and unfortunatley you guys had the traffic,” Mr Rochfort told the crowd.
He said that the project was expected to be completed in January next year once cleaning, testing and land restoration work were completed.



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