Over £1m has been spent on reducing the flood impact on Earby after a devastating scene on Boxing Day 2015, but homeowners will be wondering whether it was worth it after parts of the town were left underwater again following the arrival of storm Ciara.
A £1m culvert repair project to make Victoria Clough structurally sound was only finished in August 2019 and was supposed to protect 91 homes and 17 businesses in Earby. (link)
Prior to that, £80k was spent by Pendle Council on temporary 'watergate' flood barriers in November 2018. One resident claimed that the drains weren't cleared regularly and so prevented the installed water pumps from being used.
Councillor David Whipp, who leads on flood prevention work in Pendle and campaigned for the defences said:
"Sadly, the EA (Environment Agency) hasn’t spent a million on flood prevention. The £1 million they’ve spent on Victoria Clough was mainly to prevent it collapsing catastrophically. Apart from clearing a blockage under the old railway line, there hasn’t been any increase in capacity at all. The EA has also carried out at study that recommends further investment of £8M+ to make any meaningful reduction in the risk of flooding. Last autumn, the EA said they hoped to begin work on the first (£3.2m) phase this year...
The Natural Flood Management (which is being funded by the Leeds City Region) is part of a catchment wide approach. The work at Marlfield is very much a pilot and needs replicating at a massive scale to reduce risk of flooding in events such as we had on Sunday. However, the beck on Water Street was on a knife edge on Sunday and the marginal reduction due to the NFM at Marlfield may well have been crucial in the beck NOT overtopping there.
The deployable barriers, which are part of a Community Flood Resilience scheme worked up to a point and successfully held back water at the bridge under the old railway at Lane Ends. Sadly, water backing up and siphoning through the drains bypassed the barriers around Victoria Street leading to some flooding of homes in that area. There needs to be a solution to prevent this, but I don’t know if this is achievable.
A critical issue with the latest flooding in Earby is whether the Yorkshire Water pumps at Lane Ends were working effectively. Given the other factors, I’d have expected those pumps to have dealt with more flood water than they appeared to. Yorkshire Water must make sure the pumps are working properly and taking as much water as possible."
Another 'pilot' project using natural flood defences was also planned for Earby and set for completion before last Christmas. The scheme at Marlfield Farm include hedge planting, fencing off corners of fields from grazing so that more vegetation can grow and installing leaky barriers to slow the flow of rainwater while also providing better habitat for local wildlife.
Chris Milburn, Project Executive at the Environment Agency said:
We are very grateful to the landowners, the Procters, for working with us to trial these NFM techniques on their land which will contribute to local flood risk reduction and provide wider environmental benefits, slowing the flow of water locally and to downstream communities including Leeds.
Earby has a history of flooding and these natural techniques will not prevent this from ever happening again, but we are appealing for more landowners to come forward and work with us to install more of these measures which will have a cumulative benefit and should help the landscape to hold more water during flood events.
Despite all these schemes many residents found the ground floor of their homes flooded and the main street through Earby was unpassable.
VIDEO: Earby flooded
