Flood report will help disaster response

Councillors from all of the local authorities across the county have been working together for the past eight months on a joint investigation into how well the floods were handled.

The report is still to be finalised and published, but at a meeting at County Hall members said the document should be strategic in its approach.

Task group chairman Martin King said: “Although this has been born out of the floods there are going to be lots of strategies that can be taken out of this that will hopefully help with future issues of another nature, like a chemical attack or a major crash on our motorways.”

We previously reported how the committee, at another meeting, had criticised the actions of Severn Trent Water, the Highways Agency and even County Hall during last summer’s floods, and Coun King, of Wychavon District Council, said it was important all authorities are better prepared for dealing with major incidents in the future.

“If there’s a fire in Worcester city centre at 8am there will be a number of problems,” he said. “People will need to be rehomed, the general public will want to know what to do, how they can get to work – we have got 50 per cent of what we had with the floods.”

Fellow member Geoff Williams agreed.

“What comes out of this report should be transferrable,” he said.

Meanwhile, an idea to continually raise public awareness of what to do in the event of flooding, or other disasters, is being looked at in the report, along with the creation of local flood risk maps.

An idea to send council employees to offices they live closest to rather than normal place of work in times of crisis is another idea the group wants to put forward in a bid to prevent travel problems.

The report will now go off to all of the councils’ overview and scrutiny committees, which means the final copy will not be ready for publication before October.