'Nuisance floods' can be protected against says slow water expert ahead of Cork meeting

THE flooding caused by Storm Babet, which caused devastation in East Cork last year, would be a ‘one in a hundred year flood’ and is what a major flood relief scheme being designed at present is aimed at mitigating. However, smaller and more frequent nuisance floods can cause damage which exceeds these rarer deluges, an expert on natural flood defences has said.

Speaking in advance of a public meeting to be held in Midleton on Tuesday evening, Professor Mary Bourke told The Echo that communities acting together and with the consent of landowners, who could receive payment to allow their property be used, could implement measures inexpensively and in a matter of hours.

Already Professor Bourke has worked as consultant on smaller scale projects in Donegal and in Cork and she has now been employed by Cork County Council and the Office of Public Works to explore what the potential is in the East Cork area to implement natural flood defences.

Professor Bourke told The Echo she was excited about the challenge of her role and how Cork County Council could become the first local authority in the country to champion the use of natural flood defences at scale.

She described the nuisance flood as the body of water which blocks a road to the point people won’t be able to bring their children to school or go to work, where accidents will be caused and chains of events triggered leading to a massive final cost.

According to Professor Bourke, the damage that is caused by nuisance floods, when accumulated and multiplied by the number of times they recur, can cost economies and the community even more money than the major ‘one in a 100 year flood events’.

“They’re costing our economies and governments more money, these floods. But nobody’s looking at them because they are not dramatic flood events,” said Professor Bourke.

“There’s a real place now for us to start thinking about how we’re going to adapt to the coming climate change and focus in on these smaller but still damaging floods — the place for the nature based solutions is addressing these so-called nuisance floods,” she said.

There are a number of mitigating measures which can help to slow the flow of water starting at its source, the source of a stream at the top of a mountain, by installing what Professor Bourke calls ‘leaky dams’, barriers made up of wood and other permeable materials which fish can get through. What happens is it slows the water. She said that some rivers in England where these measures have been introduced have fifty or more leaky dams.

There are other measures which Professor Bourke intends to outline in greater detail at Tuesday’s meeting hosted by Liam Quaide, the Social Democrat councillor, in the My Place Community Centre.