Agenda

·       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.