10 April 2018

Today the village was again badly flooded in a number of areas such as Stapleford road, the bus stop area and the brook/Cow lane across the road.

I have challenged RCC regarding a number of these before and they have had consultants out from Peterborough to look at the brook and proposed creating “Grips” or gullies to feed water from the road back into the brook, not actually solving the flooding itself!

Following this morning’s issues, I contacted RCC with several photos, and to their credit they responded within 30 minutes, and subsequently Robyn Green from the Highways team met up with myself to review my photos and visit the affected locations.

She is trying to organise today (Tuesday) that the gulley team come out and suck empty and then pressure clear both the bus stop area and the bricked gulley on Stapleford road. Now fully appreciating how the bus stop area will soak commuters and the Stapleford road area,would create a road traffic accident blackspot.

Additionally, it has been accepted that the “Grip” will only solve the symptoms and not the cause of the flooding. Again, they will call in consultants to have a meeting with myself and RCC and review the options of creating a “Flood lagoon” further upstream to act as a buffer and reduce the surge effect of rainwater on the brook.
This will involve the co-operation of land owners that the brook runs through but they have a list of all those it might effect.

Finally, i took the opportunity to ask Ms Green to follow up where we were with the Improvement project for Cow lane, and she agreed to investigate and report directly back to myself.

As things develop, i will try and keep everybody informed.

Ian Arnold