More than £30m spent on flood defence works in Warrington – and more to come

MORE than £30 million has been spent on flood defence work in Warrington since Storm Eva hit the town five years ago – with more work set to come.

When 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, 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 include 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.”