Murphy has won a £45 million contract with Wessex Water to build a new major sewer network in Bristol.

The North Bristol Relief Sewer will consist of around 5kms of tunnels and over a kilometre of pipework passing through the Cribbs Causeway, Filton, and Lawrence Weston areas. Design work began in March and construction is scheduled to get underway at the end of 2019. Completion is scheduled for spring 2022.

Murphy will connect the new sewer with the existing Frome Valley Relief and Bristol Trunk Sewers, and has created bespoke solutions for the connection of the Cribbs Causeway and Henbury areas into the new system.

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Overall, the project will boost storage capacity ahead of future developments, as well as reducing flooding risk within the existing network.

John Murphy, Murphy's Chief Executive Officer, said: "We're excited to be working with Wessex Water on an extremely important project for customers in the Bristol area. We have in-house tunnelling expertise within our engineering team which helped us engineer solutions that will be key to delivering this scheme. This project was a key target in our ten-year plan and we feel very passionately about our ability to deliver for Wessex Water customers."

Sean Martin, Murphy's Tunnelling Operations Manager, said: "This project has some really interesting and complex engineering aspects to it such as the bespoke connection methods to the existing network and the crossing under of the M5 motorway. We're putting customers and residents at the heart of this work and will do everything we can to minimise disruption."

(LM/MH)