Agenda item

(1)       Mr Harwood stated that winter 2015/16 had been relatively mild with comparatively low levels of rainfall.   There had, however, been a significant surface water flood event in early January geographically focussed upon the east of the County which had particularly affected Shepway and Dover Districts.  Some 120 properties had either been flooded or required agency intervention to prevent them flooding.

(2)       Mr Harwood then referred to Appendix 1 which set out those areas in which flooding to properties had occurred as well as roads and other infrastructure which had been affected by the January intense rainfall event.  He added that KCC’s partner agencies had generally been very efficient in providing the data sets required to prepare this report. 

(3)       Mr Harwood continued by saying that Storm Imogen and its associated weather fronts had struck between 8 and 10 February. This event had coincided with high spring tides, leading to 11 flooding alerts and an Amber Severe Weather Alert being issued by the Met Office. 

(4)       Mr Harwood drew attention to paragraph 3.2 of his report. He said that Kent had some 200 trained flood wardens. There were, however, some gaps in cover within hard-to-reach communities (especially urban conurbations and coastal areas). The Environment Agency and the Kent Resilience Team were working to address this issue together with other partners through community outreach work.  This involved some innovative approaches such as the provision of additional equipment to flood wardens and locally delivered awareness training.

(5)       Further work was currently being undertaken on off-site reservoir inundation planning in Kent.  This included working with the Environment Agency to set up a specific task and finish working group. 

(6)       Mr Tant informed the Committee that during the 2013/14 flooding the Alkham Bourne ephemeral watercourse overflowed heavily, causing damage to culverts. Recovery Grant funding had been allocated to replace the culverts in the watercourse along the Alkham Valley Road.  He agreed to provide this information in written form to Dr Eddy.  

(7)       Mr Luke Thompson (Environment Agency) introduced himself as the Team Leader of the Flood Resilience Team covering Kent and South London. The role of his Team was to administer the Flood Warning Service and to work with partners such as KCC to encourage local communities to become more flood-resilient.  This had included the training seminar provided to flood wardens in 2015.

(8)       Mr Thompson went on to set out the context to some of the statistics provided in the report. He highlighted that 2015/16 had been relatively dry in Kent and South London, particularly in comparison to the conditions faced by colleagues in the North.

(9)       Mr Thompson then showed the Committee a graph demonstrating river response levels to heavy rainfall near Penshurst in the Upper Medway between 31 December 2015 and 16 January 2016. This showed river levels rising dramatically and then not falling sufficiently before the next heavy rainfall to avoid the necessity for another tidal flood warning to be issued.       A similar story could be seen in Mr Thompson’s second slide which showed river levels in the Upper Stour during this period. 

(10)     Mr Thompson’s third slide showed rainfall in Folkestone during 5 January 2016.  60 mm of rain had fallen during this 24 hour period (including very sudden and dramatic rises at certain points of the day – particularly at 11 am).  During that same period, Canterbury had only experienced 15mm, as shown in the fourth slide.  This demonstrated the extremely localised nature of the surface water flooding which had occurred.

(11)     Mr Thompson summed up by saying that a number of alerts and severe warnings had been issued but that it had been unnecessary to issue and flood warnings during the winter. 

(12)     Dr Eddy noted that the majority of the sites identified in Appendix 1 were in Dover District.  Of these, six of these were in towns and the rest roads in rural areas. 

(13)     Mr Tant clarified that the majority of risk (as opposed to flooding itself) was in urban areas.  Many of the incidents that had occurred were on roads, which meant that the impact was road closure. The difficulty of funding for flood risk management works was that the majority of money that was available to tackle flood risk was aimed at reducing the risk of flooding to residential properties. The funding available to business properties was much lower.

(14)     Mr Thompson said that the Environment Agency’s flood alerts were reflective of very large catchments.  For example, an alert in the Upper Stour area would include Ashford and the rural communities upstream of the town.

(15)     Mr Tant replied to a question from Dr Eddy by saying that Dover would not appear in a Flood Warning area because there were only two rivers in the District. As a result, the risk of fluvial flooding was lower than elsewhere. The only warnings that Dover would receive would be the severe weather warnings put out by the Met Office, which covered Kent and East Sussex (Appendix 3).   The Met Office would not be able to attempt to provide more localised severe weather warnings because weather patterns were not sufficiently easy to predict with such precision with present technology.

(16)     RESOLVED that the level of alerts and warnings since the last meeting of the Committee be noted.