Are gully pots really a part of the future of highway drainage in the UK?

Everyone who lives in the UK is familiar with the cast-iron grids at the side of the roads, spaced evenly along to carry away all the rain water. Beneath the grids are usually deep-sealed gully pots that are designed to capture some of the sediment in the highway runoff, and any small spillages of floating oil. We have been installing them for decades and every local highway authority has gully-sucking teams that take a small, specialised machine out to suck all the collected debris out of the pots and to take it away for treatment and disposal. Every few years, the highway industry questions the sagacity of using these devices as they are resource-intensive to maintain, they can pose a hazard to cyclists and they are a death-trap for amphibians. There is also extensive evidence to suggest that they aren’t actually all that good at capturing the pollutants in the runoff either; when it rains hard, all the collected debris is flushed out of the pots, causing a ‘spike’ of pollution. So Jo Bradley went out with one of the Lancashire County Council Teams to see what sort of problems the team encounter. Stewart and Wilf were very kind to share their knowledge and experience with Jo and they came up with some ideas to make the process easier. In the next few months, Stormwater Shepherds UK will be part of a team that reviews and updates the guidance on gully pot maintenance and we hope that this first-hand experience will help us to inform practical, sensible solutions. Do you have a gully pot near your home? Did you know that they usually discharge to a river or stream so it is important that we never put anything down them that will cause pollution, such as car washing water or surplus paint.