And the rains came again!

I was looking forward to Saturday morning just gone and the chance for a bit of a sleep in after what had been a thoroughly long and busy week. I’d got a Garrick event to speak briefly at during lunchtime and that was it…. or so I thought.

Heavy rain used to be an inconvenience until the floods in June but, at least at the moment, it worries me because of what else it may bring. We’d had hours of heavy rain Friday night into Saturday and an hour before I left for the Garrick I got a call to say there was some flooding problems at Fazeley but that it was nothing like as bad as last time and was under control.

Said my ‘piece’ to the gathering at the Garrick and decided to head down to Fazeley to see what was happening and talk to residents. It was worse than I had anticipated and a small road called New Mill Lane, which was badly flooded in June, was knee deep in water again.

It’s difficult to know what to say to locals who are so fed up with being in the same situation as only 5 weeks before. It was the canal this time which was causing the problems and in the five hours I was there it flooded more and more covering most of the road, overflowing the culvert by a foot and in turn making the water in houses deeper and deeper. Although there were plenty of sandbags available this time the water was so deep they had little effect. This really has to be sorted out…. more about that later.

During the afternoon at Fazeley we were told that fields and some roads in Hopwas were flooding (same as in June) and also that the Tame, which runs by Elford, had been put on a higher alert by the Environment Agency. They were also saying, however, that it was very unlikely to flood.

The general feeling was deja vu and so I decided to leave Fazeley and head over to Elford to see for myself what, if anything, was happening. When they said Hopwas was flooded again it was no exaggeration. It really was totally impassable so getting to Elford the long way round took an hour.

When I did get there the EA were already on standby with a pump but the river was well below the top of its banks. I talked to some locals and the EA guys for a while and then, about an hour after getting there, it started. A bit spooky really. The grates in the road started to bubble with pools of water forming quickly around them.

A further hour saw The Beck almost fully covered as far as could be seen and the pump from the EA, which was now going full pelt, wasn’t even holding its own against the rising water. It was all happening very quickly and a further larger pump and more resources arrived in the next couple of hours.

By the time I left Elford at 3am on Sunday morning there were a dozen or so officers from Staffs Fire & Rescue, 8 Environment Agency people, a handful of officers from Lichfield district council and a similar number from the County. Just about holding the flood water at bay were, by then, four pumps going at full speed. The houses which were flooded were mainly empty because of June’s floods and after pumping right into Sunday afternoon river water levels started to fall followed by the flooding in the village.

All the front line services were clearly much better prepared this time round but there are certainly some very significant infrastructure issues which need addressing because I’m certain the same problems with heavy rain will happen again. The latest flooding proved beyond doubt that the issues around when and how flooding is caused are not an exact science. Only the day before my briefing from the EA about the forcast bad weather assured me there would be no serious problems in Elford and on top of that, on the Saturday, a lot of things happened with water levels which just could not be explained by the professionals. That said, everyone worked to the limit including many villagers armed with, not only tea and coffee on tap, but invaluable local knowledge and bucket loads (pardon the pun) of moral support and great resilience.

The whole set up of dealing with water in the UK is very complicated. The Environment Agency, British Waterways, County Highways, individual landowners who have drainage ditches and the private utilities (Severn Trent) all have a hand in managing water and therefore an influence on coping with flooding.

The latter, Severn Trent, have certainly been the weak link in this chain. They’ve been poor at responding to requests from the Authorities throughout, difficult to get hold of most of the time and generally been hard work. The level of maintenance on some of their pumping stations is also dubious, at best. They are the only one of the front line services who are financially responsible to shareholders rather than accountable to the public. In my view that shows and somehow needs addressing.

I’m pleased to say that by Sunday all the water in Fazeley had gone as it had by Monday in Elford. It is really important to look at everything that has happened around flooding over the last five weeks, understand what worked well, what could be done better and, above all, make sure that improvements to flood defence and drainage is undertaken as soon as possible. I’ll do my best to make sure that the areas in my County patch at risk of flooding are high on the priority list for all the Authorities concerned and wish everyone who’s been affected by flooding this time, last time or both times the very best of luck.

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