Environment Agency probes flood defence fail

Environment Agency (EA) officials are to investigate why local flood defences failed during Storm Babet last week at Horncastle, Lincolnshire – it’s the third incident in the UK this October in which officials reportedly failed to act quickly enough to protect homes and businesses.

Some 80 homes flooded at Horncastle after a month’s worth of rain fell in 24 hours. Defra has confirmed that homes and shops near the River Bain flooded after “a sluice gate within the [flood-alleviation] scheme did not automatically operate as it should”.

The EA completed Horncastle’s £8 million flood-alleviation scheme in 2017. It has promised to investigate the failure “alongside [our] continued response to the flooding”.

Flood campaigners claim UK flood defences fell short in two other – separate – incidents this month. Sources in the Midlands say EA staff failed to raise temporary flood barriers in time to protect homes and businesses in Bewdley, Worcestershire on October 19, when heavy rains swelled the Severn during Storm Babet.

And a political row has broken out in Scotland, where MSP Murdo Fraser wants the local council to compensate Perth residents and business owners who flooded over the weekend of October 6-9. Perth and Kinross Council made an “appalling error” by failing to close the North Inch floodgates as the river Tay burst its banks during torrential rain, Fraser says.

The news comes as researchers from Unearthed looked into the condition of England’s flood defences. Unearthed and The Guardian made Freedom of Information requests, asking for EA data on the condition of England’s so-called high-consequence flood defences. Last year, the agency ranked 4,200 defences – 7 per cent of the total – in poor or very poor condition.

The EA ranked nearly 900 to be very poor and judged just 3 per cent of defences to be “very good”.

Better flood protection

UK flood and storm season is now well under way. More than 50 flood warnings are in place for the UK this week, with Storm Ciarán expected to bring driving winds and heavy rain from Wednesday evening. Swathes of Wales and the Midlands are already saturated after weeks of rain.

Flooding already causes around £700 million worth of damage annually to the UK, the Association of British Insurers estimates. It’s why home and business owners must adapt urgently to manage their flood risk, warns property flood resilience champion Mary Long-Dhonau FCIWEM.

“I’ve spent 23 years trying to raise awareness of flood risk; what we can do and how to plan for it,” she says. “And the number of people who have not prepared to flood still flabbergasts me. There’s lots of information, lots of learning that we've just got to get out there.”

CIWEM works with local authorities, government agencies and manufacturers to help owners of homes and businesses to manage flood risk. It is helping property flood resilience (PFR) professionals to scale up ways to adapt homes and businesses to cope with rising waters and recover faster after flooding. With well-over a thousand properties flooded in the midlands by Storm Babet and Storm Ciarán bearing down on the south of the country this week, CIWEM is waiving the fee on an exclusive 10-hour training package for people affected.

Long-Dhonau raised five children through repeat flooding on the River Severn. As climate change brings more frequent storms, we must all do more to protect ourselves from floods, she warns.

“With climate change, flooding can come quickly along the Severn. We were always used to the Severn rising slowly. In Worcester, we think that when the river floods in Bewdley, it gives us 28-48 hours to prepare for flooding here. This time the flooding happened within hours. The rain fell hard and intense on already-saturated ground.

“We’re seeing rivers that were slow risers becoming rapid risers.”

Predicting flood impacts

It’s an example of how climate change is making storm impacts harder to predict. The Met Office had issued a red warning for Scotland for Storm Babet, but not for the Midlands. Bewdley residents say they had just hours to evacuate their homes and businesses.

Work started last month to build permanent defences at Bewdley. A Defra spokeswoman told The Environment that two properties flooded at Beales Corner over the weekend of October 19-21.

“EA field teams had been working to install the demountable flood barriers on the right-bank side of Bewdley… The rate of rise on the River Severn was exceptional, with a 2m rise recorded in ten hours. This included a rise of nearly 1m between 0900-1100 hrs.

“It became unsafe for the EA teams to continue so we deployed temporary sandbags at properties along Severnside North as a contingency measure.”

Find out how to better manage your property’s flood risk on ciwem.org