I have received a preliminary update from the Highways Operation Team dealing with the flooding issue that have been experienced.

The Highways Team have worked extremely hard during this period, and I am sure you would like to join me in thanking them for their fantastic work throughout the Borough.

Following a forecast from the Met Office week commencing 16th October of the imminent arrival of storm Babet and a risk of flooding across the Borough. The drainage teams began preventative gully cleaning in known hotspots where flooding has impacted residents historically to ensure the SBC assets were clean and working to full capacity. These areas were in particular around culverts, rivers and streams.

The Gully machines and teams were placed on call and additional sandbags placed in stock.

We delivered sandbags to properties that had suffered with flooding in the previous weeks.

On the morning of Friday 20th October, all scheduled highway work was cancelled, and the staff were split into flood response teams. Calls from the control room were passed to our team where they were prioritised and allocated to the relevant teams based on severity of the issue, e.g. risk of flooding to properties.

Enquires raised through the website were monitored as they came in with a list of road closures visible to the back-office team to speed up responses to customers and residents.

A team of 6 inspectors dealt with the enquires and fed back into the Supervisors to allocate the works. Sandbags were deployed to around 10 specific areas across the town. The Grounds team operatives supported with the making of a further 200 sandbags

All the teams worked through until 18:00hrs on the Friday before reconvening on Saturday 06:30 to work through customer enquiries and revisit the worst affected areas.

From the morning of the 20th to 23rd October, the operations team received 165 flooding and drainage enquires. As of yesterday morning 113 of those enquires have been resolved.

52 enquires currently being reviewed / visited

Sandbag stock is back to capacity

The outcome of the enquires are being reviewed to look at further preventative measures

The website drainage system is showing live defects which have been rectified which is causing some confusion to residents. (this is being looked at)

Sandbags are issued to properties where there is an immediate risk of flooding to property only. We cannot provide sandbags to divert surface water to another location.

Directly after the flood waters receded a programme of gully cleaning and checking was scheduled and is in progress to ensure that the storm waters have not subsequently blocked gullies after the event.

I would like to thank all Councillors who have positively contributed and assisted in their wards.

On conclusion of a debrief a report will be generated for Cabinet that will evaluate the overall preparedness of the Council to ensure the best response can be achieved with the level of resources available.