Flood alert warning fails

A YEAR after the Great Flood, Buxted residents have spoken of their concern after a flood warning service for householders failed to work during a near emergency last week.

Villagers who had signed up to the Environment Agency s free warning service told the Sussex Express that no advance notice had been received on Tuesday last week, even though the nearby River Uck had broken its banks and come perilously close to invading houses.

Ironically, residents received a telephone call from the agency s automated voice service to tell them that the alert was over - but did not receive a call to alert them to the possibility of a flood.

A spokesman for the Environment Agency said the failure was caused by a rare fault between a BT line and the flood warning service.

Sheila Kelly, of Station Road, added: Nothing happened. We got a call telling us that we had been stood down but never received any call to tell us we had been on an alert.

It just makes you feel vulnerable. We have got to have a warning, because at least if one comes through in the middle of the night you know you have got to get up.

June Petit, who lives with her husband Terry in nearby Mill House, said: I was down the town talking to someone when a girl came running round from Somerfield s to say they d been put on standby. We didn t get any call; there was nothing on our answer phone. Then we were told we d been stood down and we hadn t even been told to stand up! I m disappointed as it worked last year.

I am sure these people are extremely stretched, but it would help if we could get the money the Government promised.

Jan Turner, of Mill Stream House, Station Road, said: There wasn t a warning at all. We got the call to say the alert was over, but didn t get a call to tell us about the alert in the first place.

However, Mrs Turner refused to blame Environment Agency staff for the failure and instead highlighted a lack of Government funding as the cause of the problem.

She said: I d like to see the Floodline get a bit more support. These flood warning people are up all night to try and predict flooding. We should be helping them to do it. They need some more money to get better equipment. You d think that this would have been sorted during the summer.

Flood warning officer Graham McLelland said: We take incidents like this very seriously. We need people to have faith in the system and we have spent a lot of time and effort working with flood victims to get them on to the service. The service has only been up and running for a year and we are always improving it. This is the first time a fault like this has occurred since the service started.

He said that a floodwatch was issued for the Ouse and Uck catchment area on Tuesday morning for the media and other professional parties. Later that morning, at around 10.50am, a more specific floodwatch for the River Uck was issued for individual householders on the AVM service.

Mr McLelland added: The machine has 30 telephone lines. A rare fault occured between one of the bt lines and the flood warning service, which caused the system to hang . We were unaware that the floodwatch had not fully gone out.

He said that Kingston Communications, the company employed to maintain the flood warning machines, were called in to look for a fault at the Environment Agency end, but could find no evidence of one.

He added that staff were called into work on Saturday to ensure the system was back up and tested in time for Sunday s bad weather. He also revealed that a second flood warning machine had been bought to act as a back up and that this machine would be in operation by the end of this week.

Since that incident, he added, the system has been successfully back in full operation for the 15 or so flood watches that have had to be issued in Sussex.

If you have any queries about the Floodwatch service call 0845 988 1188.