As the UK climate changes, bringing more frequent rainfall and heavy storms to the country, poor performance in vital highways and traffic areas is more readily noticed by road users. Issues including potholes regularly make local and national news pages, placing pressure on councils, local authorities and highways teams to keep on top of maintenance plans. It is estimated that potholes cost the UK economy around £14.4 billion per year due to damage to vehicles, accidents, and longer journey times.
Concrete Block Permeable Paving (CBPP) can play a valuable role on the SuDS management train for high traffic areas. They act as a source control if water can infiltrate back to ground, they can attenuate the surface water discharge, as well as clean the water and discharge at a controlled rate once a storm event has passed.
CBPP pavements have the ability to replicate the natural environment by absorbing a 5mm rainfall event with no discharge from the system and cleaning the surface water flow via their two levels of water treatment.
However, there are a number of misconceptions on the joint maintenance performance of CBPP that can block the successful adoption of the systems under Section 38 agreements, preventing their wider use as a major tool in the SuDS Management train and mitigation of surface water flooding.
In the UK existing concrete block permeable pavements have been performing with minimal maintenance for more than 20 years. Brett Landscaping’s technical team wanted to demonstrate this effectiveness using installations the company had supplied CBPP products to more than a decade ago. Brett Landscaping wants to build the case for these vital and effective SuDS components to be used as part of more water management trains as local councils and highways teams repair and rebuild UK highway infrastructure.
Working with Wakefield Council, Brett Landscaping drew from published papers and recommended test methodologies to demonstrate the continued effectiveness of Concrete Block Permeable Paving (CBPP), even following many years of little to no pavement maintenance undertaken at two sites in West Yorkshire.
Brett Landscaping was able to show the effectiveness of CBPP at these selected sites was in line with the research results undertaken by academics.
This free to download research paper has been written to counter and disprove common misconceptions within the construction industry about the long-term performance of CBPP in heavy trafficked areas, susceptible to sustained periods of rainfall.
The paper also includes a range of practical recommendations for implementing a maintenance programme for CBPP installations, to be put in place for the early life of the pavement, and for a regular annual inspection regime for more established paving installations.
These recommendations supports the paper published at the 8th International Conference on Concrete Block Paving by Dr Sonke Borgwart on the long term in-situ infiltration performance of permeable concrete block paving.
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