Partner Article

Businesses urged to fight back against floods

Businesses in the North East are being urged to play a bigger role in combating the effects of flooding, which caused millions of pounds of damage last summer.

A year on from the flash flooding that played havoc across the region, Newcastle University has released a film highlighting action that can be taken, based on its research and work by Northumbrian Water, the Environment Agency and Living With Environmental Change (LWEC).

The Flood Force – finding solutions in better company film looks at a flood model created by the university’s researchers to predict where flooding will affect businesses and how they can tackle the impact.

The model used information from Northumbrian Water’s 30,000 kilometre sewer network and data from the Environment Agency. Simple changes such as replacing hard-standing with porous surfaces gives the excess water somewhere to drain away instead of trapping it.

Northumbrian Water’s wastewater director, Richard Warneford, said: “Our wastewater and customer service teams were pushed to their limits on ‘Thunder Thursday’. The cost to our business is in the region of £28m. This is in addition to £120m that we will spend on flooding between 2010 and 2015. “We are thinking about new and innovative ways to avoid surface water entering our sewer network and to enable this partnership working is vital.”

Newcastle University’s professor of climate change and hydrology, Chris Kilsby, said: “In the future, frequent heavy downpours are likely to lead to costly flooding unless UK cities take action to manage surface water runoff.

“Our work on the frequency and impacts of extreme rainfall began over 20 years ago, largely as “blue sky” scientific research.

“It is very satisfying to see the results being recognised and used by our industry partners now, to deal with real problems faced in our cities both now and in the future.”

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Karen Dent .