Innovative tunneling helps keep Teesside roads open

A £2.7m project, which involved tunneling beneath two Teesside roads, including a busy A road, to lay a sewer pipe without disrupting traffic, has been completed.

Northumbrian Water and its partner, Mott MacDonald Bentley (MMB) have carried out upgrades to the sewer network in the Eaglescliffe area of Stockton over the last 12 months.

The new pipework stretches over 1.6 kilometres from a pumping station next to the River Tees to Allens West Railway Station, replacing an aging pipe that had reached its design life and improving the resilience of the network.

To avoid disruption on the A67, two pits were dug either side of the road and a hole was bored, through which the new sewer pipe was pulled. This trenchless technique was repeated at Aislaby Road, again avoiding the need for a road closure.

Peter Greenan, Northumbrian Water’s Project Manager, said: “Advances in the use of trenchless pipelaying are making it easier to minimise disruption when we carry out projects to lay new pipes, and we have managed to use it on this project not once, but four times to cross roads, Nelly Burdon’s Beck and crossing underneath Overhead High Voltage electricity transmission cables.

“This project has been necessary to ensure the long-term resilience of our sewer network in the Eaglescliffe area, and to have completed it without the need to close either of these important roads, has helped keep disruption to an absolute minimum.”