Surrey pores over flood-relief ideas

31 January 2007

Surrey County Council has earmarked £1M extra funding to tackle flash flooding problems, including £800,000 in capital funds for engineering-based remedial measures.
Officers are identifying ‘wet spots’ across the county’s highway network to prioritise the biggest problem areas before it decides how to spend the one-off allocation for 2007/08. The council is acting because more intense and frequent rainfall is often overwhelming its drainage system, which was designed to cope with the type of storm which occurs once every 40 years. Members had approved £300,000 for capital schemes to increase drainage capacity in 2006/07, but before that, no specific allocation was made.
The authority believes such measures are better than simply spending ever-increasing amounts on clearing blocked gullies. It will, in the coming financial year, spend £1.2M on using jetting machines to clear gullies two or three times extra in areas that regularly flood – up from £946,350 this year. A spokeswoman said that the extra £1M was needed because the county ‘was, in common with most authorities, suffering from the effects of rainfall of an intensity and frequency for which the drainage systems were never designed’.
Highway authorities often struggle to find capital funds for expensive schemes to increase drainage capacity. The need to get water companies to support engineering measures on the highway network with action on their own systems was also an obstacle, according to Jon Freer, chair of the Technical Advisors Group transport committee. ‘In trying to cope with a greater volume of rain, the problem is that even if we were to provide upgraded drainage, the surcharge on the public sewer system would just run over into our systems.’ Newcastle City Council last year installed additional road gullies, phasing work with Northumbria Water, which flushed its sewers in various areas while the authority flushed water from its roads. This followed severe flash floods in the city two years ago.

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