Andy Brown, North West Flood Risk Manager for the Environment Agency, outlines the thinking behind flood defences planned for the Kendal area

DURING autumn and winter we saw the misery that comes with flooding of people’s homes, businesses and the disruption it brings to our communities. Given what happened in December 2015 it’s entirely understandable many people remain anxious and concerned.

It’s understandable many people may feel we have been ‘dragging our feet’ in terms of delivering enhanced flood defences in Kendal and surrounding communities.

Floods bring misery but also provide opportunities to deliver improvements that may not have otherwise been possible.

The opportunity we have now is a ‘once in a generation’ one, as we have been provided with flexible funding from government. The scale of the improvements we can deliver are way beyond what would be normally justifiable in a national context.

We shared our thoughts on future investments at recent public events. Just as important for us is to hear people’s views. Although we can do a lot of scientific analysis, this has to be added to with local knowledge and professional judgement.

So what is our thinking? It will be a combination of things, as there is never a silver bullet and sadly nothing any of us do will every entirely eliminate flood risk.

In broad terms the future investment will consist of raised defences; flood storage areas; culvert upsizing; diverting some becks to help reduce the flow of water where there are ‘bottlenecks’ in the drainage systems and some pumping stations.

Understanding the effects of the options - individually and in combination - upstream, downstream and on both sides of the rivers is critical,to be confident before investing public money and ensuring we aren’t making problems worse.

The development of a new flood model for the Kent catchment has been central. This has taken longer than we expected or wanted. Thankfully we now have an accurate model that has enabled us to get our teeth into thinking about what the action on the ground could be in real detail.

Whatever we end up doing, we know it will never be acceptable to build high walls along the rivers. Our aim will be to keep raised defences in the most public areas at approximately 1.2 to 1.5m high. To do this we need to put in place approximately 1.5 million cubic metres of flood storage upstream - roughly equal to 2,500 Kendal swimming pools.

The new raised defences in Kendal, Burneside, Staveley and Ings could be 10-12kms long. This shows the size and complexity of the works. There are a huge number of landowners,occupiers and other organisations involved.

One of these key organisations is South Lakeland District Council, who we work closely with on fronts including how these actions fit into their long-term planning for Kendal. We hope to deliver, in phase 1, raised defences in the north east of Kendal that will provide a significant improvement for many businesses along with hundreds of homes. This will only be possible due to SLDC working with us and applying for European funding to supplement Defra funding.

Another piece of the ‘puzzle’ are options other than hard engineering, such as natural flood management or ‘Slowing the Flow’. Too often these things are portrayed as a false choice between hard and soft, as if in conflict. The approach we need is where these complement each other, where we work closely with communities, businesses, land owner; farmers, public authorities, utilities and many others to achieve this.

A further critical part is how we all plan and prepare for emergencies to ensure our homes and businesses are best placed to deal with floods – as sadly we can never eliminate the risk. Sign up for free flood warnings by visiting https://www.gov.uk/sign-up-for-flood-warnings or call Floodline on 0345 988 1188.

I know many people are concerned and frustrated about the time things are taking to happen. I was once told pace is the right speed to achieve the outcome you are after. The outcome we want to achieve is to deliver the best improvements we can and hence the best use of public taxpayer funding available. To achieve this we need everyone’s help, understanding and ongoing involvement to help us deliver the best for Cumbria.