The Weather

The cool dry Spring with cutting north and easterly winds now seems long forgotten, although at the time seemed to be going on forever. The unseasonably low temperatures have been replaced by a sudden change into Summer. This has brought in a period of warmth, which has rapidly escalated into uncomfortably high temperatures.

This is pretty much what we experienced last Summer with its intolerably hot and dry weather. Let’s hope this year it is interspersed with plentiful doses of rain to help our parched gardens, but hopefully avoiding any downpours bringing a threat of flooding. This all serves to remind us of the battle against climate change, although perhaps that is not a bad thing.

A recap on our DIG and a couple of others

The winter of 2000/2001 was the first time that prolonged rain over the winter and a winterbourne at very high levels combined to overload the roads and sewer system in the Valley. Fast forward to 2013/2014 and the same happened again, but this time it was felt that action was needed to enlist help from local government and utility companies to prevent this happening again. The DIG was formed in 2014 as a suggestion from David Liddington, our MP at the time and with support from David Carroll at Bucks CC.

We drew our inspiration from an established DIG at Aldbourne in Wiltshire. There, the village has the river Kennet running through it, which is a major chalkstream and renowned as a good river for anglers. The Aldbourne DIG had been fighting for action to stop groundwater entering the sewage system resulting in spillages into the village and the river. Work there involving Thames Water and improvements to the river itself continues to this day.

The West Manhood DIG near Selsey on the south coast was formed to help with flooding events in 2012. They formed a working party to create a mapping of their area to get a better understanding of why their area was being flooded. Their conclusions are shown below:

“We have demonstrated to many residents that their recollections of the way things work is not entirely sound. 50 Years of neglect has caused drains to be lost or run the wrong way. This can be proven with mapping so that often money can be saved by doing the right work. We can also identify serious misdemeanours that have created some of the issues. Many important ditches have simply been filled with a small pipe in the bottom. Others have never been seen at the correct depth in living memory.”

This set of conclusions pretty much reflect what we have learnt over the past nine years inasmuch that there is no substitute for ongoing, regular maintenance of ditches, road drainage, culverts and watercourses. For too many years there has been an emphasis on only performing vital work when there is a serious problem. There remains a job for our own HVRA DIG to do despite local flooding not being an issue for us in recent years.

Paul Woodford

It had seemed a wet autumn and winter leading up to Christmas, to the extent that the stream had risen in the park. In late January it was rising and flowing from Church Farm and below the pumping station there were the beginnings of the spring rising there in the large field depression.

When the stream is looking like it will run through the village, there is a chance that the sewerage system will become overloaded. So it was around this time that I opened the inspection cover at the front of our property, but am glad to report at this point that the drain was empty. If the sewage system through the valley is running high, the level rises correspondingly in my inspection pit. For us, it’s a sort of early warning system.

Since then, there doesn’t seem to have been any significant rain, which suggests we won’t see the stream rise in the village, nor indeed experience any sewage problems this year. Unless of course, it starts raining in earnest as soon as we go to print.

Drains and Sewers

After pursuing affinity Water relentlessly for the last year or so, I am glad to say that they have finally come back to us and advised that the culverts under the pumping station have been checked. Except that the work was actually carried out during last summer by their contractor, it’s just that Affinity didn’t know. The contractor reported that all blockages were removed, so it does suggest we were right push for this work to be done.

It’s pretty clear that maintenance is a vital part of our everyday lives, although looking after our roads, drains, sewers and other systems seems these days to be run on a crisis basis rather than carried out in a scheduled manner. Whatever the shortcomings of this modus operandi, we do have FixMyStreet and that has been working well for us in recent times.

I happened to be out in Valley Road on a walk recently and spotted Bucks CC engineers clearing the problematic drains at the foot of Trees Road – see the pic.

I reported on the FixMyStreet request  we put in about this in the last issue, so it’s really good to see the system is working. It does make me feel that the council are responding well to requests we put in. So, if you see drain and road issues needing work done, just get online and report it, it’s relatively simple to use. Just go to:

FixMyStreet (buckscc.gov.uk)

Paul Woodford