British construction award for Bacton coastal sandscaping
The Bacton to Walcott Sandscaping flood protection scheme has won the British Construction Industry Award Climate Resilience Project of the Year 2020. The BCIA Awards are annually handed out to recognise outstanding innovations, effectual project delivery and advanced product development in the British construction sector.
Innovative coastal resilience
The Bacton to Walcott Sandscaping scheme has been awarded in the category Climate Resilience. As the UK-first multi-partner project, the scheme resulted in a sand placement of approximately 1.8 million cubic metres on the beach near Bacton.
The flood scheme has been designed by Dutch consultancy firm Royal HaskoningDHV (RHDHV) and the sand has been placed on the beach by dredging consortium Team van Oord (with partners Van Oord, Kier Group, Mackley and RHDHV) in 2019.
Large scale nourishment
The scheme can be seen as the ‘little nephew’ of a similar one-off sand placement on the Dutch coast of 21,5 million cubic meter in 2011, called the Sand Motor in 2015.
‘Sandscaping’ stands for large-scale nourishment, designed to work with natural processes, including currents, to disperse the sand and heighten and widen beaches downstream as well. Dutch and UK water authorities have teamed up to monitor the effectiveness of this new type of beach nourishments in order to support future coastal management decisions.
Award for utility project of the year
The BCIA awards also include the Utility project of the year. This year's award went to United Utilities for its Morecambe Catchment Strategy.
The strategy addressed the water quality in the Morecambe Bay and includes the improvement of the sewer system in the coastal town of Morecambe, a modernization of its waste water treatment plant with Nereda technology, and the introduction of a tidal pumping system for the outfall pipelines which discharge effluent into the bay.
Lead designer of the modernization is consultancy firm Jacobs, with VolkerStevin as main contractor. Royal HaskoningDHV is involved as project contractor to design the Nereda treatment plant.
