North Lodge Pumping Station

Image: © Ian Dodds Taken: 19 Sep 2022

Having trawled the internet for a good while in order to try and find out exactly what the purpose of this modern-looking facility was, I eventually stumbled across a very technical case study of it, contained within a very technical report from New Zealand, and was quite overwhelmed. Who knew that the pumping of water was such a tricky business? A lot of attention was paid to various flow rates and the location of air valves. It turns out it is a wastewater pumping station, built to prevent sewage entering the River Irvine during storm conditions, which seems to have been a longstanding problem. Whereas previously, if the pipe network was struggling with the volume of wastewater, valves would just open and divert it into the river via Combined Sewer Overflows (CSOs), now it gets directed through here and is then pumped to a treatment facility a few miles away. On top of that, if it is exceptionally wet there is a facility to divert up to 10,000 cubic metres into an underground holding tank that sits in between actual North Lodge and the pumping station and occupies a large proportion of the field that separates the two. The crane runners are there to allow easy removal of the big pumps (which, in combination, can deal with 900 litres per second) for maintenance.

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