Pond lining in Staffordshire

Gravel, estates and hill farms

Sand and gravel have been worked along the Trent and the Tame for generations, and many old pits became angling and leisure lakes. A new lake or margin cut into those gravels will drain unless it is lined. New housing around Lichfield, Stafford, Burton and Stone brings lined attenuation ponds as part of its drainage, while Moorlands farms need reservoirs and storage ponds on thin, stony ground, where a puddled clay bottom was never an option and a protective underlay is essential.

Membranes and what they suit

We pick the liner after looking at the pond's size, shape, use and formation, and we install all of the following.

• HDPE: large reservoirs and basins, and the hardest UV exposure
• LLDPE: weldable panels that conform to an irregular bed
• EPDM: smaller ornamental and wildlife ponds
• PP: flexible sheet for complicated shapes and details
• GCL: a bentonite clay liner for gentle, covered ponds

Work on the HS2 line

South of the county, beside the HS2 works near Coventry, we lined a pond in 1mm HDPE and checked every seam of it. The same railway runs on north into Staffordshire, and the same standard applies to any pond we line in the county: welded seams, a recorded test weld and records you can pass to your client.

From formation to anchor trench

The pond is dug and trimmed by others. We start with a felt-like underlay on the trimmed bed, so stones in the Staffordshire gravel can't press through, then roll out the panels and fuse them with wedge and extrusion welders. Inlet and outlet pipes are booted, and a trench around the crest takes the edge of the sheet.

Before we leave, the seams, details and anchorage are inspected and the weld test records completed, with handover documents to match.

Attenuation ponds on new estates

Lined attenuation ponds on housing schemes around Lichfield, Burton and Stafford are usually built in the first phase, before the roads and plots drain to them. They then have to stay watertight through years of construction runoff, so we take particular care over inlet headwalls and outfall details, where most of the movement happens. The finished weld records go into the developer's drainage file, ready for whoever takes the pond on.