Agenda and minutes

·       Hear from and talk to your Ward Councillors and City of  York Council Highways Officers

·       Feed your views and experience into a review to inform future operational practice

See Report below;

PECKITT STREET AND TOWER GARDENS FLOOD OPERATIONS REVIEW

Background

The Peckitt Street and Tower Gardens area of the city has been historically impacted during significant river Ouse flood events. Figure 1, below, shows the peak flood extents in the area.

Many homes and businesses have carried out work to make their properties more resilient to flooding.

The downstream area in Figure 1 is characterised by residential properties in Peckitt Street, Friars Terrace, South Esplanade and Tower Place and although all have floor levels significantly raised above those in Kings Staith / South Esplanade many properties have suffered from reoccurring flooding and have adopted Property Flood Resilience^[1] (PFR) measures to reduce its impacts.

Figure 1 - peak flood outlines in cell B15 (BH11 and 17 relate to borehole records)

In addition to the individual flood resilience measures in this flood cell City of York Council has historically carried out temporary sandbagging and pumping on Friars Terrace and Peckitt Street in numerous events since the November 2000 floods.

This procedure was successful against a river level of 4.42m above normal summer level at the Viking river level recorder. The operation was very labour intensive and potentially unsafe, involving the manual handling of hundreds of sandbags next to the river, often in darkness and rain, decisions to commence the construction had to be made on early river level forecasts due to the length of time needed for its completion, this often led to abortive works when peak levels came in below those forecasted.

Designs were developed following the 2008 floods to carry out works to raise the privately owned retaining wall in front of No’s 8 Peckitt Street, 1 – 3 Friars Terrace and 1 – 5 South Esplanade to make it more watertight against river flooding and to raise the wall along this length and the Council owned highway retaining wall at the end of Peckitt Street. Pedestrian access at this point was maintained through the inclusion of demountable flood barriers.

The justification for the project was on the grounds of safety, resource efficiency and reliability, and it was made clear that this would provide protection up to a river level of 4.7m (this was communicated widely with the community at the time), a significant improvement over the previous temporary works. The works were part funded by the Yorkshire Regional Flood Defence Committee (now the Yorkshire Regional Flood and Coastal Committee). The works were completed in early 2010.

The new flood resilience measures worked effectively and were fully tested with two significant flood events in 2012. The operational response at this location normally requires sandbags and pumps to be deployed to minimise the impact of seepage through the drop boards but decisions were taken to significantly increase the extent of this operation in response to forecasted levels in November 2012.  ...  view the full agenda text for item 1.

Guildhall Ward Committee Meeting – Minutes

Tuesday 16^th April 2024

Peckitt Street

CYC Operational Response to Flooding Events

In attendance: Cllr Dave Merrett (Chair), Cllr Rachel Melly, Cllr Tony Clarke, Cllr Kate Ravilious. Steve Wragg Head of Highways Asset Management John Putsey Construction Manager (Highways) Nick Massingham Highways Operations Manager Mora Scaife Communities Team Manager, Local Residents.

Welcome and introductions.

Cllr Dave Merrett welcomed everyone to the meeting and introduced the ward members, Cllr Kate Ravilious Executive Member for Environment and Climate Emergency and council officers in attendance.

It was explained that this meeting was a single-issue meeting to talk to residents on site regarding the City of York Council response to local flooding events. Originally had intended to have a meeting in a venue and then include a walkabout so a separate meeting will be organised to follow up on issues raised at this meeting. A report has ben published on the council website alongside the notification for this meeting.

There have been requests for the council’s operation plan to be published in full. It is important to put some context around the plan on how CYC uses the flood plan for example it’s important to understand that trigger levels for action are not solely reliant on the Viking Recorder information but also on in person input from the Environment Agency.

A few residents have asked to talk about a flood plan for Peckitt Street and to understand how and what we deploy in response to flooding events.

Ward Councillors were keen to meet on site in order that exact locations of issues could been seen as well as discussed.

Also, worth noting that when publishing the complete Flood Plan some information may need to be redacted where it refers to people and properties.

The meeting was then opened up to resident questions/comments:

Resident: The cause of the issues is a non-existent or inadequate local flood plan. Our main issue is not triggering levels but having a plan which includes locations, details about what happens where and when. The knowledge in people’s heads needs capturing. Every year mistakes are made e.g., Tower Gardens, operatives don’t have knowledge of how water pools in areas, use of a small pump at the back requires the main pump to be operational in order to pull the water from the back.

A random assortment of pumps are used each time with different hose lengths which perform differently, and this is a waste of resources.

As residents we must guess our action levels as we don’t know what the response will be from CYC.

We need a proper reliable flood plan. The CYC flood risk strategy states that the nature of flooding in York allows a consistent approach.

We don’t need a dynamic response we want the same thing every time, we want CYC to build a consistent response.

We want a detailed flood plan to be produced with Cllr Ravilious’ agreement.

We want a date for production of a flood plan and  ...  view the full minutes text for item 2.