James is speaking regularly to Anglian Water, the Environment Agency, and Norfolk County Council regarding the flooding across North West Norfolk. Anglian Water has shared this update following James' call raising specific constituency cases as well as the overall situation:
Anglian Water update:
As you will be aware we are dealing with large scale flooding across our region, following excessive and persistent rainfall since Christmas. Following such persistent rainfall, any further rainfall, even small volumes that are falling on already saturated ground, are causing significant challenges as groundwater levels are extremely high and inundating into our sewer network. This coupled with the fact that wider drainage systems are at capacity and several rivers have burst their banks is resulting in flooding affecting some communities in our region, rather than a specific problem with our network. Sewers are simply not designed to carry this volume of water we’ve seen, or take excess flows from overflowing rivers and streams in some areas. Even once the rain stops, water levels will take time to peak before they begin to subside and the situation starts to improve.
Our teams have been working tirelessly since Christmas to help as many customers as we can who have been and continue to be affected by the flooding. At some locations we are tankering water away from our pumping stations to reduce the floodwater and help keep customers’ facilities working. We have doubled the number of tankers in operation to more than 100 so we can help customers whose homes are flooding or where there is a risk to the environment. We’re also working with the Environment Agency in various locations, to agree temporary permits which allow us to safely pump flood water away into nearby rivers and streams. These are called Local Enforcement Position statements (LEPs) and are only granted if they meet certain strict environmental and flood risk criteria. Once we have these pumps in place it means we can redeploy tankers to where they are needed most critically, in areas where LEPs are not an option. We only have a finite number of tankers and we need to balance all customer and environmental risks.
The use of these LEPs is seen as a very last resort where we have no other options. We will only consider requesting a LEP where the floodwater will not cause environmental harm or increase flood risk downstream. Also, we will only over pump volumes that our pumping stations cannot cope with and nothing more. As soon as our pumping stations are able to keep up with flows we will stop over pumping.
As discussed, we currently have LEPs operating in Grimston, Burnham Thorpe and we have a LEP ready to go in South Creake, we will be direct pumping once this has been set up on Thursday, within your constituency to reduce the impact on residents. We continue to tanker from our pumping station in Burnham Deepdale and will be investigating a LEP and direct pumping for Gayton, additionally, we are looking at reported drainage problems in Thornham.
Please be advised that these LEPs are operating under strict environmental parameters set by the Environment Agency and we are conducting daily checks and submitting sampling data to the Environment Agency to ensure no environmental harm.
