Public is given say on £50m lagoons to cut floods

THE public is being consulted over £50m plans to build large storage lagoons to capture water before it floods thousands of homes in Hull and the East Riding and prevent a repeat of the disaster eight years ago.

Work is about to start building a series of lagoons as part of a £14.4m scheme to cut the risk of flooding to 8,000 homes in Willerby and Derringham.

Funding is being sought for a £20m project at Cottingham, extending a scheme which is already in place along the Raywell Valley to create up to 13 lagoons to cut the risk of flooding to 4,000 homes. A similar £15m scheme will seek to protect 3,000 properties in Anlaby and East Ella with one large lagoon.

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They are among 20 measures in the Flood Risk Management Plan for the Hull and Haltemprice area, the first of a series to cover each of the area’s 15 hydrological catchments, which was launched yesterday.

Hull was the worst affected local authority in the country in the June floods of 2007, with more than 8,000 homes and hundreds of businesses affected. Some 6,019 homes and 93 business were damaged in the East Riding.

East Riding Council’s flood risk strategy manager Andy MacLachlan said: “In simple terms we have a large amount of water coming off agricultural land and it is pouring into the city and has nowhere to go, which is exactly what we saw in 2007.

“In the Great Gutter valley, for example all the water came down through Willerby like a river, down Kingston Road and was stopped by the railway line. Several thousand homes went underwater. If we were to put a new sewerage tunnel in it would be prohibitively expensive, so the solution on the edge of urban areas is create some very large storage lagoons which are normally empty and would take the run off, which will be kept till after the storms and then released slowly at a controlled rate.”

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There has been criticism of the schemes which may not be used for 10 to 20 years, but Mr MacLachlan said: “There is the perception among the casual observer that you can go with a JCB and shift some muck and everything is fine, there’s no need to model it, but you simply can’t do that.

“When you hold back hundreds and thousands of cubic metres of water above an urban area you need to be sure that the engineering is spot on. When we go to the government for £15m we need a very robust and evidence-based case as because we are competing against people against the country we have to do an extremely large amount of hydrological modelling and lots of site investigations.”

As well as the right type of clay needing to be used, liners sometimes are needed to protect groundwater. Natural England and English Heritage have to be consulted and wildlife monitoring carried out.

“Building the thing is relatively easy – getting to the point where we are able to build and have satisfied the stakeholders and the regulators can be extremely difficult and very expensive,” added Mr MacLachlan.