THE ENVIRONMENT Agency has announced that their flood defence repair works in Appleby are almost complete.

The flow of the River Eden in Appleby on December 6 was the highest ever recorded, flooding around 170 homes and businesses, and damaging some flood defence structures in the town.

A ‘community action table’ is now available online, detailing everything the Environment Agency and partners are doing to recover from Storm Desmond and prepare for this winter.

The table also looks at longer term actions of what can be done to better manage local flood risk in the future.

The Environment Agency’s flood risk management work in Appleby has included:

- Repairs to the flood defence walls at Holme Farm Bridge – this work is due for completion in the next few weeks.

- Repairs to the flood embankment at the cricket pitch.

- Debris clearance from the river channel and removal of damaged trees along the banks.

- Construction of a permanent flood defence wall at the Swimming Pool car park to replace manual mountable defences.

The Environment Agency and Cumbria Floods Partnership are now working to identify longer term flood risk management plans for Appleby and the wider Eden catchment, using £6.5 million of investment allocated to the Eden catchment.

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 A pot of up to £25 million has also been secured for Carlisle, which also sits in the Eden catchment.

Matt Crump, Environment Agency Manager, said: “We’re working hard with communities and partner organisations to help local homeowners and businesses recover from Storms Desmond and Eva and prepare for winter 2016.

“The bulk of our work in Appleby has involved repairing flood defence structures to maintain levels of protection.

“We’re now developing plans to manage local flood risk in the long term using the funds we secured from Government. We’re keen for local people to be involved, so we would encourage residents to join the Appleby Flood Action Group, who act as our main point of contact.

“We’re aware that people would like us to ‘dredge’, or remove gravel, from the River Eden in Appleby, but our modelling shows that it wouldn’t reduce flood risk to local properties.

“We took cross-section surveys downstream of St Lawrence Bridge, on the Swimming Pool bend and downstream of Holme Farm Bridge, which showed the gravel shoals had changed in shape and size since Storm Desmond but, importantly, have not impacted the amount of water that can flow down the river.

“We’ll continue to monitor the size of these shoals by surveying the shape of the river bed, and remove gravel if they reach trigger levels that would increase flood risk to local properties.”

A ‘community action table’ is available at https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/cumbria-flood-action-plan

Residents and businesses are urged to prepare their own individual flood plans by searching for ‘personal flood plan’ on www.gov.uk.

Sign up to flood warnings by calling Floodline on 0345 988 1188 or by following @EnvAgencyNW and #floodaware on Twitter for the latest flood updates.