Pickering’s lesson to flood-hit towns as Malton has lucky escape – Yorkshire Post Letters

“SLOWING the Flow” has suddenly become a buzzword with politicians and senior civil servants. In 2008 it was largely reserved for cranks and tree huggers. There was apparently no evidence that it worked, so there was no money to produce the evidence.

Pickering, in the desolate wilds of North Yorkshire, bucked the trend. Natural Flood Management (NFM) measures were installed in the upper catchment and an upstream bund built above the town, which had suffered four serious floods in just eight years.

Only three months after completion on Boxing Day 2015, the bund and associated NFM held back water from the town during Storm Desmond while communities all across Northern England suffered catastrophic floods.

The evidence was clear and Slowing the Flow suddenly became flavour of the month – both effective and cost-effective and a small ray of sunshine among so many black clouds.

On January 21, almost exactly five years on, and water levels from Storm Christoph in excess of that day in 2015, saw Pickering protected once again, while other local towns faced the prospect of serious flooding.

It is the 35th time that the bund has held back water that would otherwise have caused flooding in the town.

That sounds like money well spent and worth replicating in many other locations at repeated risk of flooding, most of which will never qualify for Government funding due to cost-benefit calculations. Do we continue to treat the symptoms of flooding or try to address the causes? Do we abandon small communities countrywide to repeated flooding?

Will man-made global warming make the problem even worse? How does this NFM and upstream storage work? What about beavers too? Shouldn’t more people know about it?

From: Catherine Egan, Maesteg, Llynfi Valley.

I LIVED in York for several years in the 1970s and worked for the North Eastern Electricity Board in Dundas Street. Often flooding caused absolute disruption and the city closed to all traffic. This was over 40 years ago and still we see devastating floods.

It is known that weather phenomena are set to get even worse due to climate change. When is the Government and the Environment Agency going to address this problem?

I now live in South Wales where some valley communities have to deal with this year upon year – just like York. This is the 21st century and residents and businesses should not have to experience this devastation year after year.

Forty plus years since I left York – and still the problem hasn’t been rectified. Really?

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