The following email photos and video have been sent to Hilary Ellis, Principal Sustainable Drainage Officer & Flood Risk Contract Manager
Flood Risk & Biodiversity Team at Cambridgeshire County Council in connection with the recent flood events on Manor Gardens. Thank you to the residents who provided the images and video footage.
Hi Hilary,
I hope that you have had a great summer.
Following a discussion at Buckden’s Large Scale Planning Committee I’m writing to you to report that the Parish Council’s continues to have significant concerns about the drainage from the new Luck Lane development site. My understanding is that the site is now connected to the Buckden drainage system via the drains at Wier Close. As you can see from that attached video and photographs the village has experienced significant flooding following the recent thunder storms.
Such flooding was unprecedented prior to the connection of the Lucks Lane site to the Buckden drainage system. Of particular concern is that water was seen erupting from man hole covers (see image above), which suggests that this is more than a surface water issue. I am concerned that the connection of the Lucks Lane development has overloaded the Buckden sewage and drainage system and will continue to do so again the future. Reports from residents indicate that sewage is mixed in with the surface water which suggests something has gone seriously wrong and raises public health issues.
We note that the attenuation basin designed to capture the surface water on the Lucks Lane site and protect the surrounding area continues to be at capacity:
It does look like the flood risk management challenges may be happening, but perhaps not in the place or way that we originally anticipated. I would be grateful if you could investigate and report back to me with potential causes, responsibility and remediation at your earliest opportunity.
Many thanks for your support,
Martin.
Martin Hassall
Buckden Parish Councillor
Chair Large-Scale Planning Committee
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Following on from our conversation last week, I am emailing you to give an update on our proposed steps we are going to take in order to investigate this issue further. While this is not a list of actions yet, we need to do some background work before being able to formalise any actions.
– The first step, is to work out whether this is a public or private sewer to inform the next steps. If this is a public sewer then we will need to inform Anglian Water of this issue as it would be one of their assets which is struggling with this capacity of water and they need to be informed of these problems.
– We are going to contact Bloor Homes, who have developed this site, to ensure the agreed surface water drainage has been installed on site.
– We will inform Hunts planning of the issues and keep them up to date with the information we find out.
Once we have carried out these steps, we will be able to give clearer course of action regarding how to investigate this further.
We will keep you up to date with our progress. If you have any queries please do not hesitate to contact me.
Kind regards
Harry Pickford
Sustainable Drainage and Flood Risk Officer