Thames Water has set out details of its improvement plan following Ofwat’s review in the aftermath of the Beast from the East - the water company said it will transform its response to unexpected major incidents in future.

Launching the 40 page plan, Thames Water MD Steve Robertson said:

“We cannot promise that a similar incident will not happen in the future. What we can promise is that our ability to manage the impact will be transformed.”

The Beast from the East in late February and early March saw a sustained period of freezing temperatures followed by a rapid thaw which the water company said had “an unprecedented impact on the water network.”

This led to an increase in the number of bursts across the network and an even bigger increase on customers’ pipes, leading to a rapid increase in demand, beyond what Thames had predicted and prepared for. As a result, approximately 75,000 customers suffered low pressure or were without water.

Outlining the context of the incident, the report says:

“Due to the fact the rapid thaw occurred overnight following a challenging operational period and over a weekend, this shortfall in our planning and preparedness restricted our capability to fully mobilise the resources needed to undertake the unprecedented number of repairs needed on our network, increase our proactive communications and provide alternative water resources.”

Key issues identified which led to the failure to respond adequately include:

• Weather modelling system did not take into account a range of weather events
• Emergency response and planning was not flexible enough to mitigate the impact of the incident on customers.
• Escalation of the incident was too late
• Communication with vulnerable customers
• Communication with business customers and retailers was delayed and was not proactive

Thames Water is open in acknowledging the inadequacies of its response to the event, saying:

“Despite our winter preparation, the fact very few customers were impacted in our rural areas and the Thames Valley, and our people working around the clock, we failed to protect all of our customers from the impact of this weather, particularly in London.”

The report goes into considerable detail on the range of measures and improvements it has either already implemented or is planning to put in place. Key highlights include:

• new Gold/Silver/Bronze command incident management structure for major incidents or forecasted significant threats
• Gold command will be led by a member of the Executive team with leads from each silver command. Briefings will be provided from gold command into the CEO and Thames Water Board
• Improving modelling of weather events to allow early escalation and preparation of comprehensive plans ahead of any forecast adverse weather
• Increasing resources in front line teams including repair gangs, network engineers and customer agents to ensure the utility can provide a more flexible and responsive service
• Developing real time digital visualisation tools which take into account network information and customer contacts to provide a geospatial view of the impact of incidents allowing it to react in a faster, proactive, agile manner.
• Increasing proactive campaigns and implementing direct communication with household and non-household customers on a large scale.
• Increasing engagement and proactive sharing of information both during and in preparing for incidents with key stakeholders including Local Authorities and Local Resilience Forums (LRFs).
• Expanding Priority Services Register (PSR) from 57,000 to 115,000 by 2020 and to 400,000 by 2025
• Improving the accessibility of the priority service for customers in vulnerable circumstances

“Clear shortcoming in modelling capability”

Prior to the Beast from the East, the report says Thames Water already had a number of well-developed models used on a daily basis to understand the impact of weather on assets and demand for water. However, in this instance the models did not fully predict the impact of the fast thaw over the period 3–9 March 2018.

The report describes the models’ inability to predict the impact of the fast thaw on customers’ side pipes, from which around 70% of the leakage occurred, as “a clear shortcoming in our modelling capability.”

The models for severe cold weather have now been enhanced by incorporating data and learning from the Freeze Thaw event – the updated models will be available for winter 2018/19. The additional data will be drawn from the roll-out of Thames’ smart metering programme.

By 2020 Thames will have installed 300,000 smart meters providing near real time data on household usage - allowing it to spot households that have a leak on their supply pipe. The smart meter roll out will continue during AMP7 - the utility is aiming to have over 1 million installed by 2025.

Full restructure under ‘One Thames’ is basis for improved operational planning and customer experience

The report says that the full restructure of the company and launch of a new structure under the utility’s ‘One Thames’ programme in April this year has provided the foundation for improved operational planning and customer experience. ‘One Thames’ changes include:

• Migrated 15 customer facing functions into a single customer experience team to provide a more cohesive customer experience
• Moved all operational functions into a single operational business unit enabling an end to end view of operational customer journeys and flexible, integrated resource management across all operational teams
• Strengthened dedicated incident management team.
• Built a new digital team with in-house capability to develop applications in an agile manner to respond to emerging customer needs

Revised water production planning and routine maintenance activities

Although Thames was able to increase production capacity by approximately 300 Mega Litres per Day (MLD) by 4 March 2018, the company said it needs to ensure the capability is available during every winter or summer incident.

Maintenance plans have now been further optimised so that more work is completed in the autumn and spring in preparation for the winter and summer respectively.

Thames Water said it is also reviewing contingency plans for all of its critical systems by 31 December 2018. This will address the issue discovered at Norwood service reservoir which drained during the incident and prolonged the incident for many customers.

Improving ability to understand the numbers of customers affected – digital tool enablers

During a typical water mains burst Thames already has the capability to understand which customers are affected using Geographical Information System (GIS) which also stores topographical data, together with using “live” network pressure data.

However, the report says its current software functionality could not undertake the extensive analysis required during the Freeze Thaw, where a large number of local networks were impacted simultaneously.

Thames Water has now started work to understand the requirements to expand its systems capability for large scale events, saying it expects “this will require comprehensive software and systems upgrades.”

Company will fundamentally change how it communicates with customers in the longer term

Commenting on the number of communications channels used in the run up to the incident, Thames said it recognises the need to further build its capabilities to be able to deliver communications to customers in the way they prefer.

The report says the water company’s intention to fundamentally change how it communicates with customers in the longer term will “reduce the accepted over reliance on social media platforms.”

“We acknowledge that our ability to proactively identify all customers that were impacted in a timely, accurate manner did not meet both our own and customer expectations. This was particularly evident in areas where our customer relationships are through third parties and where there were significant operational complexities during the incident. We are committed to better identifying both our direct and indirect customers impacted by an incident and their level of impact.”

Click here to read the Freeze Thaw report in full