Community centric rainwater project
When it rains heavily, excess water runs off roofs and driveways and drains into the sewers. It causes sewers and sewage treatment works to become overwhelmed. The result of this is flooding and pollution.
Our community-centric rainwater project aimed to:
- Provide solutions to help ‘slow the flow’ of rainwater entering sewers
- Encourage residential communities to adopt rainwater capture tools
- Provide a framework for building participation in future solutions
Single water capture devices have little effect slowing large volumes of rainwater. However, thousands of devices could create enough ‘distributed storage’ across a neighbourhood.
Distributed storage of rainwater offers many benefits. However, deployment at scale within target communities has been a major challenge.
National debates on combined sewer overflows (CSOs) have focused on large capital investments. While overlooking the ability of communities to contribute to offsetting storm water overflows.
Results of the project
The project ran from July 2022 until February 2024. This community centric rainwater project documented an industry-wide blueprint and helped to:
Enable monitoring and auditing of assets deployed through Thames Water’s investments
Bring together stakeholders to explore citizen science-based monitoring approaches
Provide a framework for building participation in future solutions
Test the combination of incentivising and implementation