Work has started to lay the pipes needed to transfer treated drinking water from South West Water’s new £60 million Mayflower Water Treatment Works into Plymouth’s water distribution system.

The new pipeline will run from the new treatment works, currently under construction at Roborough, just north of Plymouth, to Coombe Lane, near Tamerton Foliot. Later in the project more pipes will need to be laid between Coombe Lane and Plymouth.

570 seven-metre pipes, each weighing 1.4 tonnes, will be laid approximately two metres deep along the four-kilometre route. Each pipe is 80cm in diameter.

The pipeline will cross under the A386 – a tunnelling machine will be used to burrow this 60-metre long section in July, enabling the main Plymouth to Tavistock road to remain open.

Most of the rest of the pipeline will be under fields, but two brief road closures are planned.

Mayflower Water Treatment Works will use cutting-edge treatment processes

South West Water’s new £60 million state-of-the-art Mayflower Water Treatment Works will replace the outdated treatment works at Crownhill in Plymouth, which was built in the 1950s and is reaching the end of its useful life

About 150 people will be employed in its construction, which will serve Plymouth and the surrounding area and meet the needs of Plymouth’s growing population.

It will use cutting-edge treatment processes, designed and developed by leading Dutch water technology company PWN Technologies, and tested at a prototype facility at Crownhill from June 2013 until June 2015

The new technology uses suspended ion exchange with resin regeneration system, inline coagulation and ceramic membrane microfiltration. It is the first time that this combined technology has been used in the UK

The construction phase is scheduled to finish by end of March 2018. Mayflower will become operational in September 2018, with the existing Crownhill works retiring from service a few months later.