Funding secured to tackle area hit by heavy floods

An organisation has secured £280,000 worth of flood prevention funding for an area that was severely hit during storms.

The village of Debenham in Suffolk saw 70 properties flooded during Storm Babet in October 2023, largely due to the River Deben overflowing.

East Suffolk Catchment Partnership is working to improve the flow of the river and secured the funding from the Environment Agency.

Dr Helen Dangerfield, director at Essex and Suffolk Rivers Trust which is working on the project, said this flood prevention scheme had been a "real priority" for the group.

"It's really important," she said.

"We can see from the impacts of the rainfall before Storm Babet, and at Storm Babet itself, that flood resilience needs to increase in the upper part of the catchment and throughout the catchment."

A Suffolk County Council report released last year told how most of the flooding in Debenham during Storm Babet came from both overflowing rivers and surface run-off water.

After the report, the Environment Agency said it had "assessed the river level data and flood impacts" and refined its flood warning and alert trigger threshold levels after issues were raised with the system by the council.

East Suffolk Catchment Partnership's Debenham flood prevention project is part of its wider initiative, Recovering the Deben: From Source to Sea.

Dr Dangerfield explained it would look at two watercourses - the Cherry Tree brook and Derry brook that both flooded during Storm Babet.

The flood prevention plan will see two new natural flood storage areas built to lower the risk of flooding downstream.

The first of these will be created at Winston Green, with a capacity for up to 14,500 cubic metres of floodwater.

"We're just awaiting planning permission, but we're hoping to start [on the Cherry Tree brook] in the spring and it should be finished by the summer," Dr Dangerfield continued.

"That's the first of the two schemes and then the Derry brook will follow on later, we're just in the process of finalising the designs for that one."

New ponds will also be created to improve water quality and attract wildlife.

Dr Dangerfield said the project had come about as a "result of people working together".

"These projects wouldn't come about without the landowners, farmers and forward-thinking individuals who have put forward the areas of land to store water on," she added.

Dr Dangerfield said she hoped to look at other areas prone to flooding and encouraged anyone with ideas to get in touch with East Suffolk Catchment Partnership.

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