Damage limitation: Lessons from Cumbria

Last November the Cumbrian towns of Cockermouth and Workington experienced the full force of Mother Nature, as record rainfall led to extreme flooding that destroyed homes, swept away bridges and severed local roads.

Two months on Workington remains virtually split in two. The only means of crossing the river Derwent, which divides the town, is by rail via a temporary railway station built by Network Rail or by foot on a temporary footbridge built by the Royal Engineers in the immediate aftermath of the floods.

“The Met Office tells us that, in Cumbria, 372.4mm of rail fell at Seathwaite and 361.4mm between 18 and 20 November”

Huw Irranica-Davies, Environment Minister

Work is now starting on a temporary road bridge. Reconstruction of the two road bridges swept away or damaged irreparably in the floods will take much longer. The cost to the local community will be immense, even with government assistance as more than 1,300 homes were flooded.

The Department for Transport is funding the bridge and road repairs, in line with its emergency funding scheme. The £1M community recovery fund announced by prime minister Gordon Brown and supplied and managed by the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) will be for local authorities to use as they see fit in assisting those residents and businesses affected.

The North West Development Agency has opened a £1M flood recovery grant scheme and it is also investing a further £100,000 on pushing the message that Cumbria is ready to welcome visitors after the floods. The DCLG has also announced that funds from the Bellwin scheme for local authorities for emergency clear-up costs and temporary accommodation will be fully available. Department for Work and Pensions’ social fund community care grants are also being released for people on qualifying benefits to meet the cost of replacing essential household items. Crisis loans are also available.

But the costs will certainly go far beyond that, a report from the Environment Agency revealed last week (News last week).

The summer 2007 floods cost the country a total of £3.2bn, including more than £2bn to homeowners and businesses and 400,000 in lost pupil days as a result of enforced school closures.

“Investment in the building and maintaining of flood defences will need to almost double to £1bn a year by 2025”

Robert Runcie

“It has now been almost two months since the floods in Cumbria and although the full economic costs will not be known for some time, our report into the summer 2007 floods suggests that they are likely to be substantial,” says Agency director of flood risk management Robert Runcie.

Which leaves many observers asking whether more could have been done.

“It is worth recalling the sheer scale of the weather that affected the people of Cumbria in those few days,” says environment minister Huw Irranca-Davies.

“The Met Office tells us that, in Cumbria, 372.4mm of rain fell at Seathwaite and 361.4mm of rain fell at Honister between 8am on Wednesday 18 November and 4am on Friday 20 November. Provisionally, the 24-hour total at Seathwaite of 314.4mm is a UK record for a single location in any given 24- hour period.”

Irranca-Davies also points out that since summer 2007 the government, through the Environment Agency, has completed 106 flood defence schemes protecting more than 63,800 additional homes in England, invested £60M to help tackle surface water flooding To add to that 140,000 more people have signed up to receive flood warnings in England and Wales. The current three-year spending plan will also see £2.2bn spent on flood defence.

Since summer 2007 the Environment Agency has also launched its new flood forecasting centre − one of the key recommendations of Sir Michael Pitt’s report into those floods.

The centre provides a unique service, with Met Office forecasters and Environment Agency hydrologists working side-by-side to allow emergency responders a longer lead time to prepare for, and respond to, flooding.

In Cumbria, the centre played an important role in providing emergency services with early guidance on the rainfall forecast, as well as expert advice on the flood risk impacts. Up to 36 hours before the flooding occurred, it indicated a high risk of significant property flooding and extreme danger to life in Cumbria via its flood guidance statement and through rolling telephone conferences.

With government funds certain to be tight in future years, advance warning may be the best some communities can hope for.

Certainly in Cumbria, Environment Agency engineers suspect that little more could have been done − ruling out suggestions that land use in the upper catchment or thata lack of dredging of the River Derwent channel may have exacerbated the flooding.

“Regarding land use, in this kind of extreme event, nothing would have stopped [the water running off the land],” says Agency head of asset management Jim Barlow.

“And dredging has more of an impact in managing more frequent flood events when you are trying to contain the flood within the river banks,” he says. “In this kind of event any in-channel works are of limited value.”

Barlow added that localised dredging can simply transfer flood risk to more vulnerable areas further downstream.

“With dredging it is obvious that if you increase the crosssectional area of the channel then it will convey more water. That may benefit one area but the net effect of flood risk is more complicated, and it could introduce more flood risk further downstream.”

He adds that channel management is often more focused on removing debris that could be swept downstream in a flood and damage infrastructure, such as flood defences or bridges.

Barlow is keen to use events in Cumbria as a means of reopening the debate on how the country as a whole handles the future impacts of climate change. Last summer, the Agency said that £20bn must be spent over the next 25 years, just to maintain the current level of protection to the one in six homes now at risk from flooding.

“There is an issue for the nation as a whole to be aware of the impact of floods,” says Barlow.

In Cumbria itself, Cockermouth’s flood defences were last upgraded following the floods of January 2005. Then, £100,000 was spent raising them to provide protection against a 1 in 100 year event.

There are no plans to further upgrade these defences, but Barlow says that they are likely to be reviewed.

“You set the level of flood defences based on a balance of cost against the level of protection offered. You can pretty much guarantee that following this incident there will be a look at this position and a decision made if that is still the most cost effective solution.”

A few kilometres up the coast, Carlisle escaped serious flooding in November because £38M was spent on defences since the last flood in 2005. The defences are still under construction, but were sufficiently complete to protect properties when beefed up with temporary flood defences. Away from Cumbria, the Environment Agency also installed temporary defences to protect properties in Shrewsbury and Bewdley.

Runcie is determined that investments in schemes like these continue.

“The 2007 floods cost homeowners, businesses, emergency services and others some £3.2bn. The high costs of flooding underline the importance for continued investment in reducing flood risk, particularly as climate change means that we are likely to see more severe and frequent flooding in future,” he says.

The Agency estimates that the average annual cost of flood damage to residential and commercial property across England, as well as the cost of further disruption, damage to infrastructure and loss of business, could rise by 60% by 2035 unless funding for flood defences is increased. It believes that the damage avoided through its investment proposals could save England some £180bn over the next 100 years.

“Investment in the building and maintaining of flood defences will need to almost double to £1bn a year by 2035 to keep pace with climate change,” says Runcie.

Resolving that argument will clearly take time, and in the meantime the Agency is urging owners of properties damaged in last month’s Cumbria floods − and in future floods − to insist that insurers pay to repair their homes and businesses to higher flood resilience standards.

The Agency is unhappy that properties affected by flooding are simply returned to their previous state, meaning that similar damage is likely if flooding occurs in future. It says that repairing a property that has been flooded offers a chance to minimise the damage and disruption that could be caused in future.

“It is vital that homeowners look at ways of making their property more flood-proof,” says Runcie.There is a variety of simple measures that can be taken to make it easier and cheaper to clean up after flooding when repairing a property.

This includes:

• Laying ceramic tiles on the ground floor and using rugs instead of fitted carpets
• Raising the height of electrical sockets to at least 1.5m above ground floor level
• Using lime plaster instead of gypsum on walls
• Fitting stainless steel or plastic kitchens instead of chipboard ones or having movable freestanding kitchen units
• Fitting non-return valves to drains and water inlet pipes
• Replacing timber window frames and doors with synthetic ones, which are easier to clean.

“There is also a growing range of tested products for keeping flood water out of your property, which we would advise those at risk of flooding to consider, in addition to signing up to the Environment Agency’s free flood warning service on our website,” says Runcie.

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