Civil engineering has always been about providing safe and functional infrastructure for our modern society. It encompasses all sectors such as highways, bridges, tunnels, rail, water utilities and power networks.
As our in-house experience has been with most of these sectors at some time or other, we can appreciate the importance to the country for having a resilient and reliable infrastructure. Civil engineers have always provided infrastructure, from good sound Victorian engineers to modern visionary bridge builders. However, in these times of climate change and no matter how you view the risk, our infrastructure will increasingly be under threat from extreme weather events and rising sea levels.
There is much talk about exactly how much to allow for climate change as an addition to rainfall events and peak river flows. Fortunately, the new CS469 Scour Risk Assessment code now includes four National Application Annex, N.A.A.; England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. These annex list the recommended percentage additional allowance for climate change for various river catchments and also the increase in tidal sea levels to 2100. For example, the Argyll, Western islands and the West highlands river basins have an additional allowances are +56% on Qa to the period to 2100. These are very alarming increases! No one can predict when a storm occurs, where it is going to land or how intense a storm could be. Whilst we now have better storm warning facilities in the UK, no one can stop the rush of flood waters. We can only sit by and watch the damage incurred to their infrastructure. Bridge Scour Management to CS469 is not prepared to sit by and watch.
Our scour risk assessments can be carried out on any road over river bridge owned and managed by Highways England or any of the other three Highway Authorities in the UK. As we are in times of severely constrained Local Authority budgets, Bridge Scour Management to CS469 Limited can provide a very cost-effective scour risk assessment package for all Local Authority road over river bridges. Please refer to Our Services for a full list of what we do.