HS2’s giant viaduct could poison or cut vital water supplies
IT HAS already been labelled a white elephant and condemned as an environmental blight. Now there are fears that HS2 could also cause a drought.
Campaigners have accused project managers of taking an ‘insane gamble’ by planning to build a two- mile viaduct that risks contaminating water and cutting off supplies for hundreds of thousands of people.
The viaduct, which will span the Colne Valley Regional Park in West London, will require several hundred concrete piles to be drilled deep into chalk ground which holds huge amounts of water and supplies more than one billion litres each day.
Affinity Water, one of the UK’s biggest water firms, supplying 3.5 million customers across the Home Counties, draws 60 per cent of its water from the source, known as the Chiltern aquifer, via a series of boreholes.
The HS2 rail l i ne between London and Birmingham will pass close to six boreholes, including three in the Colne Valley Regional Park. Affinity warned Parliament six years ago that construction of the £56 billion railway could lead to pollution, causing the water supply to be ‘entirely jeopardised’.
HS2 has paid Affinity £55 million to modify five treatment sites and two boreholes in a bid to protect water quality, but the Government has admitted that ‘ fully mitigating the risk is not possible due to the unpredictable nature of impacts on the aquifer’.
The first piles are scheduled to be sunk later this year and the Government’s worst-case scenario is that three boreholes are destroyed, forcing Affinity to build new ones and divert emergency supplies from elsewhere in the country for a year at a cost of £77 million. Astonishingly, Ministers have agreed that taxpayers will foot the bill should supplies be disrupted.
Joe Rukin, campaign manager for Stop HS2, said: ‘ HS2 are taking an insane gamble with the water supply to hundreds of thousands of people.
‘The problem with the Chiltern aquifer is that no one knows exactly how it works. When you start messing about with it, you simply do not know how much damage it is going to cause.’
And Tory MP Cheryl Gillan, through whose Buckinghamshire constituency the line will run, said: ‘The potential contamination and interruption of our water supplies from HS2 construction cannot be underestimated.’
A spokesman for Affinity Water said: ‘We will ensure customer supplies are maintained.’
HS2 said: ‘ We have worked for several years with the Environment Agency and Affinity Water on a range of a measures designed to ensure the continuity of water supply and the protection of the wider water environment.’