Innovation centre helps to reduce threat of flooding in Yorkshire

The project is helping local firms to win contracts which are reducing the risk of flooding across the region. The University of Hull’s Energy and Environment Institute includes an interdisciplinary team who live and work in areas that face significant flood risk.

The team at the institute has developed the Flood Innovation Centre project, which has been successful in securing £1.9m from the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF). This has been matched with a £1.5m contribution from the university to help it support local companies.

The business leaders who have benefited from the centre’s work include Dan Roche of M.B. Roche Civil Engineering, who made contact with the Flood Innovation Centre during the Covid-19 pandemic when he spotted an advert for a free workshop about property flood resilience measures.

He said: “Property flood resilience was something we’d offered in the past, but I knew that new products were coming out, so I decided to sign up to the workshop to find out more. The best part of attending for me was the contacts I made; people were connecting with one another and networking.”

He said these connections have led to a number of projects including a scheme which involved installing a rain garden at the University of Hull’s Energy and Environment Institute. This was part of its campus-wide Blue-Green Lab project, which aims to develop an understanding the impact of sustainable drainage systems.

Hiatt Jackson of the Flood Innovation Centre said: “Together with our regional stakeholders, we’d already identified a gap in the market locally for companies with the knowledge and expertise to install sustainable drainage systems.

"This meant that local projects were often being awarded to large national companies. With several key stakeholders suggesting that there was a growing need for this type of service, one of our goals was to equip local firms with the skills and knowledge to offer these installations, reducing the carbon footprint of this type of work and also bolstering the local economy.”

The Flood Innovation Centre secured the support of GreenBlue Urban, who are experts in pre-fabricated sustainable drainage structures, and received a donation of two of their hydroplanters for the project, which are monitored by sensors.

Time-lapse photography equipment was used to analyse the installation process, and act as a teaching and training resource for M.B. Roche Civil Engineering in the future. As the data from the sensors came in, the university shared the results with Mr Roche and his team to help them to understand how to use it to demonstrate the impact of their work.

He said: “Working on the rain garden installation provided our team with an opportunity to learn more about this type of infrastructure and how it can have an impact on surface water flooding as a direct result of how we carry out our work. Working with the Flood Innovation Centre has already helped us to secure new work and allowed us to include sustainable drainage installation and the installation of hydraulic monitoring systems as services that we can confidently offer in the local area.”