Five years on from the Boxing Day Flood

Almost five years ago, flooding on an unprecedented scale caused devastation and misery for thousands of people across Cheshire.

Since then, flood defences across Cheshire have been built, repaired or have temporary repairs or measures in place for winter as part of a regional flood recovery programme.

Storm Eva hit parts of Cheshire on Boxing Day 2015 bringing the worst flooding incident to the North West for over a generation. Around 2,250 homes and 500 business were flooded, more than 31,200 properties lost power and damage to infrastructure totalled £11.5m

Now, almost five years on the Environment Agency and its partners have completed construction on a total of 27 flood risk management schemes, better protecting more than 20,000 properties across Greater Manchester, Merseyside and Cheshire. This includes the £7m Northwich Flood Scheme and the £34m Warrington and Mersey Flood alleviation Scheme, which shielded more than 2,000 properties in February 2020 from the effects of Storms Ciara and Dennis.

In excess of £44 million has been spent on the construction of flood defences in Cheshire since 2010 with another £3 million in flood defences being invested over the next year. This includes the development of a major scheme in Penketh and Whittle Brooks.

The scheme, which will protect up to 211 properties upon completion, received a much awaited boost of £480,000 in July 2020 as part of a government funding package of £170m to accelerate flood defence construction in 2020 or 2021.

Peter Costello, Area Flood and Coastal Risk Manager for the Environment Agency said: “The Environment Agency continues to put a huge amount of focus on learning lessons and improving how we respond to flood incidents. We’re working with partners and have increased our number of multi-agency flooding exercises and have more staff trained and specialist equipment available following the unprecedented events of Storm Eva, allowing us to constantly improve our response to flooding.

“27 communities across Greater Manchester, Merseyside and Cheshire have benefitted from some of the most state-of-the-art flood defences with work completed at Northwich, Warrington and Bacup. We continue to support communities that do not have permanent flood defences and remain at risk of flooding. We are doing this in many ways, from forecasting potential flood risk and warning communities, to increasing our capability to deploy temporary flood assets such as temporary flood barriers or mobile high-volume pumps. Last year, routine maintenance activities by our field teams reduced the risk of flooding to over 18,300 properties across the region.

“Natural flood management is also playing a critical part to improve our resilience to flooding and coastal change. We are working with partners throughout Cheshire to implement tree planting and slow the flow measures to reduce flood risk and improve the environment.”

·         The government has recently announced a record £5.2 billion investment in flood and coastal defences – double the previous investment – to protect 336,000 properties, and the EA’s FCRM strategy will prepare us for more extreme weather and build a better prepared and more resilient nation. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/national-flood-and-coastal-erosion-risk-management-strategy-for-england--2.

·         People can find out more information on how to make their homes, businesses and communities more resilient to flooding at https://flood-warning-information.service.gov.uk/what-to-do-in-a-flood.

·         The climate emergency means we cannot prevent all flooding. We’re working to make communities resilient to future flooding but it is essential that people know their flood risk and sign up for flood warnings in their area. https://flood-warning-information.service.gov.uk/warnings.