Andrew has provided the following update on the River Aire Flood Investigation.
Andrew reports:
I have been pulled out of the ballot to ask a question at Prime Minister's Questions this Wednesday and will probably be raising flood defence funding and referencing the flooding on the River Aire last year.
Last week I also had a catch up with Environment Agency to continue to keep up the pressure on them and other partners to come forward with solutions following the flood last February.
I hope the below bullets are a useful update -
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- The North Yorkshire independent flood report, covering the flooding on their side is already out and can be viewed here from about page 38 - https://www.northyorks.gov.uk/.../201202%20Section%2019...
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- The East Riding Independent Section 19 interim report will likely publish in early February. This is a fairly normal timeframe but I know people are anxious. I suspect it will largely mirror the findings of the North Yorkshire report in its conclusions about the interplay of the weather, saturated land and high tide levels in creating a record amount of water in the system.
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- The question then is what comes next as the Section 19 reports are really the start, rather than the end, of the process. The modelling works to provide some of the data to provide possible solutions has already commenced by the Environment Agency.
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- Other partners such as the Internal Drainage Board are already involved in looking at possible schemes and solutions. Whilst the events that led to February are rare, as the climate changes flood risk is increasing so we need measures to deal with any repeat.
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- Those solutions could be at a property level, community level or a bigger scheme covering our part of the Aire, or a combination of all.
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- Bigger schemes can take some time to design and secure funding etc so the EA have confirmed to me that they are also looking at short term measures that would be deployed if ever this risk appeared again. This is what happened in South Ferriby where I worked hard to help secure funding for the improvements there. In the intervening period temporary measures were used to deal with flood risk.
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- There were obviously failings in how agencies responded to the events in February and in how they communicated with the public and with each other. We must await the report to learn more on this but I will be continuing to push on those issues.
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- My job is to do all I can to push forward any proposals that emerge to deal with this flood risk locally and I am continuing to engage with all of the agencies to keep the pressure up on that. For years I have fought for and helped secure tens of millions of pounds of funding for flood schemes across the area, be that Reedness, Burringham, South Ferriby, Goole or indeed even the millions that were spent on the Snaith defences in 2015. I will continue to do that here too.
