Our Director of Operations, Jo Bradley, was pleased to be invited to visit the construction site of the A417 Missing Link Road near Gloucester in August, along with members of the of the Upper Thames Catchment Partnership.
We were welcomed by Carolyn Ferguson of Kier Transportation, and she delivered a very interesting presentation about the evolution of the road scheme, and why it was necessary. Her colleague Zeke Mensah-Kessie, the Environmental Manager, told us about the biodiversity opportunities that they are delivering and the fascinating detail about the relocation of snakes to allow the scheme to go ahead.
The scheme is large and impressive, and Kier have worked to deliver benefits to local people and some local community schemes. They also gave us the detail of the trial that they are carrying out to use Biochar on site, to create a reuse for the scrub and vegetation that they generated as they cleared the site. They have created Biochar from this organic matter and they are using it as a soil improver and, potentially, in their SuDS soils. It will be interesting to see how this trial goes; I worry that Biochar can vary from site to site in its performance so relying on it to capture pollutants might be risky. But, fingers crossed, this trial will show that it has potential and more sites can run similar trials.
There are, however, some problems with the design of the runoff treatment schemes on this new road, with the sediment removal devices being installed in the wrong place in the design. Stormwater Shepherds alerted National Highways to this design flaw, but it doesn’t appear to have been corrected.
Are there any new roads schemes planned near your home? If there are, and you’d like help shaping responses to the planning application with regard to water pollution, let me know and I can have a look at the design drawings with you.
