Thomas Lea, Assistant Flood Risk Management Engineer at RAB, recently participated in CIWEM’s Early Career Professionals Challenge 2025. This new project initiative is aimed at early career professionals within their first three years in the water and environment sector, and is designed to foster collaboration across organisations and geographies to solve a challenge in the water and environment sector.
The challenge assigned was to deliver a 20-minute podcast and a 15-minute presentation that would ‘help answer a problem posed by industry’. This aligned with the 2025 River and Coastal Group Technical Conference: ‘Balancing the challenge of translating policy into practice with uncertainty within the rivers and coastal space’
Thomas was grouped with two sewer network modellers from different companies. The team decided to work to the group’s strengths, so their podcast addressed combined sewage overflows (CSOs) and delved into the causes of sewage spills covering the aging infrastructure and requirement for CSOs the relevant legislation, future targets, timeframes, and whether they thought they were achievable.
The presentation was delivered to the rest of the group and hosted by WSPs Mailbox office in Birmingham on the 15th July where there were networking opportunities and representatives from CIWEM who were able to answer questions about the routes to chartership.
Congratulations Thomas!