A DIG meeting was held to discuss the flooding events the Valley had been experiencing in February and March. Attendees were essentially DIG members local to lower Valley Rd affected by the sewage issues. The issues discussed included:

Surface water flooding along Warrendene and into the Harrow and gardens close by

Sewage leakage problems experienced in lower Valley Road and Boss Lane affecting up to 20 houses caused by prolonged rainfall

The meeting spent some considerable time talking about individual experiences, action taken to cope with incidents of flooding and help given by local agencies.

Bucks Council

It was noted that only following the Harrow flooding of 17/18^th did maintenance work on road drains start. This is work that had been requested several times via FixMyStreet by the DIG.This work is not complete yet and is viewed as a contributory factor in worsening the results of the flooding at that time.

It was decided that the DIG should write to the Chief Executive of Bucks Council to express our dissatisfaction with the service provided and to request a detailed investigation be undertaken to determine the cause of the flooding and how it might have been prevented.

Thames Water

Since losing access to Darren Trenchard, our main contact at Thames Water, we had been trying to find someone to replace him, without success. We were finally able to get some up to date intelligence on TW via an introduction thanks to Roger Hewitt. Our findings are as follows:

We were informed that TW have changed dramatically since our flooding 10 years ago, principally:

Centralisation of management and operationsChange in approach to planning. As we have seen with the DWMP although this is now a massive operation although there is precious little documentation relating to Little Marlow other than a page with reference to sewer lining, surface water management and investing in the sewage treatment works. They don’t say what they will do at Little Marlow (I guess it will be mostly increasing storage capacity to reduce releases into the Thames). There is absolutely no reference to Hughenden Valley.Equipment and resources are now centrally located in warehouses rather than, say, at the STW. This suggests our dedicated overpumping units are no longer at Marlow and in any event no one at TW probably has any knowledge of units dedicated for our use. I did receive a mail from Simon Cook (next to Chiltern Car Sales) at the weekend who said a Lanes engineer told him ‘all resources are out in use’ when he asked about the overpumping units.

The relationship has fundamentally changed in recent years with the Environment Agency. The legislation has been vastly tightened up making it far more difficult to gain approval on things like overpumping.

The response from TW during this month was agreed as being poor to useless. In effect, any call outs resulted in TW contractors visiting houses and offering sympathy but little else. There had been no help from requests for local pumping out of inspection pits or to install  overpumping units such as was put in place in 2014. However, towards the end of March, frequent tinkering took place at Spring Rising, where there was considerable flooding from an inspection pit.

Actions agreed:

We would remove all references to overpumping from the DIG website as that is something no longer reserved for us

We would write to the CEO of Thames Water to express our dissatisfaction with the recent help given. We will compare it with the much higher level of help given in 2000 and 2014. Also, to request some proper detail on the Drainage Plans for our area plus to provide us with an engineering contact who could visit us and hear our complaints.

Paul Woodford

HVRA DIG