£14m flood defences are handed over to the community

The scheme aims to reduce the risk of flooding to homes and businesses in Ripon which has been repeatedly hit by deluges, with the most recent happening last month.

The new defences will be officially handed to Ripon today and will be used to protect in excess of 600 properties in the city, which was founded more than 1,300 years ago.

Oliver Harmar, the Environment Agency’s flood manager in North Yorkshire, said: “At the end of September, we yet again saw the devastating impacts which flooding can have on communities. These new defences will help improve the flood protection in Ripon. We can never completely remove the threat of flooding, so it is important for local people to understand the defences and what to do in event of a flood.”

Ripon’s long history of flooding has been caused largely by the city’s location at the point where the rivers Skell, Laver and Ure meet, although major developments during recent decades have exacerbated the problems.

However, the initial defence scheme was one of a series of projects to be affected by a lack of funding from Westminster and was shelved in 2006, despite a history of major floods hitting the area.

The £14.4m scheme, which includes an upstream flood storage reservoir, improves protection to 548 homes and 96 businesses in Ripon. It has been used three times since being completed in December 2011, including in the September floods.

The flood storage area has the capacity to hold up to 1.5m cubic metres of flood water, the equivalent of 600 Olympic swimming pools.

Officials from the Environment Agency were in the city yesterday to give advice and guidance on flooding and give people more information about the new flood defences which today will be officially handed over to the local community.

The agency said that before the new defences were built some homes in Ripon had a chance of flooding as high as 10 per cent in any one year. Now it says that while it can never remove the risk of flooding entirely, the defences have now reduced this chance to one per cent in any given year.

The scheme has seen a flood storage reservoir built on the River Laver near Birkby Nab farm, while new flood defences have been built behind houses along Borrage Lane and improvements have been made to Borrage Bridge.

In normal conditions the flood storage area will just be a high earth bank, blending into the surrounding fields and allowing the river to pass through it at a normal rate. When rain falls and the river level rises water will start to get held back behind the bank, until eventually up to 1.5m cubic metres of water could be stored there.

“With this much water effectively removed from the river, the level of the Skell through Ripon will be as much as one metre lower than it would have been in the past,” a spokesman for Environment the Agency said.

Other work has also been carried out including the building of new embankments along the River Skell at Fishergreen, while a new embankment and walls have been built upstream of North Bridge, and sections of the road have been slightly raised. Two flood arches under North Bridge have been cleared and the old Alma Weir near the Water Rat pub has also been lowered.

Mr Harmar added: “Whilst improving the flood protection in Ripon, we have also been able to make a number of environmental improvements. We have installed a new fish pass on the weir. This will help migratory fish to swim further upstream to spawning grounds.

“As part of the work, we have also improved footpaths and stepping stones, and planted trees around the defences.”

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