“Slosh, slosh, slosh!”… this was how Hedon Town Councillor Gordon Thurston described his visit to the fields on Magdalen Lane recently. He was referring to the standing water on the fields in the vicinity of the site where the new care home is to be built.
Councillor Thurston had donned his wellies and visited the site in advance of the Town Council meeting last week. At the meeting he urged the Council to once again express its serious concerns about the water retention on the site where the care home is to be located.
The Town Council agreed to send a letter to council planners highlighting its ongoing concerns about flooding risk at the site. The Town Council is keen that any development at the site mitigates flood risks and does not increase that risk at the site or surrounding areas.
The photo captures the scene over the weekend on the Magdalen Lane fields after particularly heavy rainfall.
I don’t have a problem with this proposal. However Cllr. Dennis knows as well as me that ERYC does not always have the best track record on enforcement! I remind him of the decade long fiasco at the waste water treatment plant (sewage works to you and me.) John was very much to the fore of fighting for improvements there – but officials seemed powerless to genuinely police the long list of conditions attached to the original planning approval.
Of course water always sits on the field after heavy rain, until it naturally drains away to the nearest dyke. That has always been the case for this land, and most of the fields in the flood plain, There’s nothing new in this whatsoever. I suspect the Magdalen Lane field looks like it is in the photo, perhaps 6 times a year
Obviously when the land is built on, all that water falling onto roofs and concreted car parks etc can’t just sit on the land any more, so it will be directed through gulleys and drainpipes into carefully designed underground storage tanks.it will then be allowed to flow gradually to the drainage system at a predetermined ‘agricultural rate’, In other words it won’t be allowed to swamp the existing drainage system.
What is required, as I have said at several Hedon TC meeting, is that the ERYC impose robust and enforceable conditions to the design of the surface water system for this project, ensuring that, in effect, there is no negative impact on neighbouring properties, or indeed the rest of the town.