£350,000 floods scheme in Shrewsbury off to a strong start
An innovative pilot project to prevent flooding is off to a "good start" after the first phase of work was completed in Shrewsbury.
Work has now been completed at Battlefield, Shrewsbury, after the Environment Agency allocated £350,000 of initial funding for the six-year Slow the Flow project, which creates so-called 'sustainable drainage systems'.
The project, which follows successful work already carried in flood-prone areas of the Lake District, includes the creation of landscape features that capture and slowly release surface water before it reaches Shropshire's rivers and causes flooding further downstream.
The organisers of the project, Shropshire Wildlife Trust in partnership with Shropshire Council, claim that the scheme will also provide habitats for wildlife and reduce the flow of sediment into the county's rivers.
Initial phases of work to alleviate flooding at the A49 Battlefield roundabout in Shrewsbury were finished in December 2015, and further work to create new drainage features on the catchment have now been completed.
Pete Lambert, river projects manager for the Shropshire Wildlife Trust says initial results have been encouraging.
"This is Shropshire's first Slow The Flow catchment and over the next six years there'll be another four to five. It's a good start," he said.
"In the Battlefield area you have the Battlefield service station, which is a recent development, and over the last 15 years you've also got the accumulation of new buildings and properties and they've been severely impacted by flooding here on a number of occasions. The shop just by the garage has been flooded in 2007 and 2009 and that costs tens of thousands of pounds – there's a business impact. We wanted to understand the problems there.
"Slow the Flow Shropshire is about introducing a new range of options on to the menu. Traditional measures focus very much on transporting the water away very quickly, but that leads to issues where you have to build very expensive infrastructure and it's just not a sustainable solution."
The project will extend into the wider Corvedale catchment area near Craven Arms later this year, with a similar scheme in the planning phase for the Seifton Brook.
