Catcliffe residents voice their displeasure at a meeting with the Environment Agency, where area director for Yorkshire Mike Gugher apologised for how a flood warning system failed during Storm Babet in October 2023.
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00Sir, can I bring in the gentleman at the back? He's been trying to get in for a while.
00:04So, regarding your message at 2.15am in the morning, calling people on the phone, yes, I received it.
00:14I got up in the morning, 2.30 in the morning, went up to the riverbank and saw Environment Agency stood around looking bewildered.
00:28And I said to them at 2.30 in the morning, what's your next step?
00:34They said, we're going to call the fire brigade.
00:38By the time I got from that river to Walgreens Road, which is 100 yards away, where my house is, where the caravan is still, the water was up to my ankles.
00:55I went into my house to fetch my dog out, which is only a puppy, within 15 minutes it was up to me knees.
01:06I said to my neighbour, you'll have to excuse my language, and he said, I've got to go, we've got to go.
01:16And it went up to his privet eye.
01:20I ended up with five and a half foot in my house.
01:24Luckily, my family weren't here, but I went to work that day, and I could see it coming in on the camera.
01:34And I thought, what are they going to do?
01:38Nothing. You've done nothing.
01:41You've done nothing. Oh, sorry, you have done something.
01:45You've re-laid the road outside my house.
01:49Why can't we spend the money on the defences?
01:58That's over a million pounds to re-laid the road.
02:01And now they're going to dig it up again.
02:06What we aim to do is to be able to offer a flood warning service that gives information out to the people who are going to be affected by that.
02:17As the river levels continue to respond throughout the day to the rainfall that we've seen,
02:22they go through a series of automated triggers on our flood warning system.
02:27And at half past one on Saturday morning, so through Friday night into early Saturday morning,
02:33it went through a trigger which automatically queues up to send a flood warning.
02:39And that was at half past one on Saturday morning, the early hours of Saturday morning.
02:46Come back, I'll finish.
02:48So, what we do know is that that warning didn't land with you as recipients until after two o'clock.
02:59The records on the system that we have reports when the warning is sent and received by recipients.
03:07And that's at 2.15 in the morning.
03:11What we always aim to try and do, as a minimum, is give people two hours of notice.
03:16And what I would like to acknowledge today is that we know, and I am sorry,
03:22we do know that people didn't get what should have been, as a minimum, two and a half hours,
03:28but it was less than two hours in some cases, because of the way the warnings were queued up into the system and the way they were delivered.
03:36I think your siren idea is brilliant, so let's get looking at that.
03:39For next time, yeah.
03:41When is it actually?
03:42There will be, yeah.
03:44There will be a limited time.
03:45Yeah, there will be a limited time.
03:46Yeah, there will be.
03:47Yeah, there will.
03:48There will.
03:49If you continue...