“We are the custodians of the water.”

“My story isn’t really a story or the bit I’m playing. It’s a book that’s half written and I’m probably one paragraph, on one page of that book. The story started with the dragging of The Fens, in the 1600’s. And I work for an organisation, The Middle Level Commissioners, and we’re the custodians of the water that comes into the system. The water that comes from rainfall, the water that we take from the River Nene and we bring into our system. Because we can’t turn the clock back and because the land has shrunk, the height of this building, and we are literally not draining by gravity any more, as it would have occurred in the 1600s. It was a complex system of long, straight drains with sluice gates but it’s still relied on gravity. That’s no longer the case. Around about a quarter to a third of our district is pumped, three times, before we get the water away. We have 23,000 houses and businesses that are all set inside our catchment, that totally rely on the work that we do to keep the water out of the doors, out of the lounges and the living rooms.

So that’s the day job. It’s an interesting system. It’s sort of being all powerful. You can turn the pumps on and you make the water go away. But the other side of the coin is we don’t have to turn the water on. So we play this game. During the winter, we’re trying to keep the land dry and, during the summer, we’re trying to keep it wet. But, of course, if we can turn the flow of the rivers off, which we can, then we have the opportunity to keep it wetter than we can. And because we are taking water off the River Nene, water that would have flown out to sea is coming into our system and we are feeding it back. The abstractors that is growing the crops you heard  about earlier are reliant on that system. So it is very unnatural system but it is very eco-friendly because we aren’t taking water that we’ve pumped up to reservoirs and pumped back down again. No, we are taking it locally and distributing locally, through mechanical means, and the Great Fen, now, is reliant on what we’re doing now.

What we know is, we can’t turn the clock back. That the story starts on page one and it continues. What we can do, as people, is we can adapt. We can change. We can change our landscape and we can recognise balance and so we can use water in different ways. We can use water to grow crops. We can use water to feed our people and keep us alive and we can look after the environment. And it’s nice to be involved, as an engineer, in all of these aspects in getting the balance right.

The other challenge we have, in Middle Level Commissioners,  iswe are also a navigational authority. That becomes a stress because, if we take the water down to low, boats can’t get through the locks and if we take the water too high, they can’t get under our bridges. So not only are we trying to manage water for flood risk and water resources but we have an envelope  of about there to there. Surprise, surprise, in summer is here and winter is here, and that difference is our storage, available storage within the system. But that foot of water, over these long straight drains, and we have 180 km of drains that might be up to 20-40 metres wide, that’s a lot of storage capacity.

We work with farmers and we encourage them and there are opportunities to create reservoirs, within the system, and transfer water through our system. So it is in evolving picture and it will evolve, long after my time and my children’s time and my children’s children’s time. Because, as long as there are people living in The Fens, and The Fens are vibrant places and their economies are vibrant, there will be a place for a Middle Level Commissioners. That’s my story.”