Slad Brook gets £500,000

Flood risk management projects that have been granted a share of the £3,075,000, and will start work in the coming year, include Lydney, Slad Brook in Stroud and Daniels Brook in Gloucester.

Slad Brook will get a £500,000 storage scheme upstream of New Mills Trading Estate after an internal bid in the Environment Agency. This will hopefully protect up to 20 properties - 60 to 70% of those at risk from flooding. More work will be needed to protect the remaining properties. I have been wanting to publicise this great news for a wee while but it was only made public last week.

Some of the success of this bid is due to the work of Green party group leader on the District Council, Sarah Lunnon who helped set up the Slad Brook Action Group (modeled on the Ruscombe Brook Action Group) and has pushed for action at the District and County level plus more.

The success can also be attributed to the vision of Water 21 who have pushed for more sustainable ways of managing our water for many years - and the work of Water 21's students last year that have contributed to this - Illaria (pictured) who was originally working on the Ruscombe Brook had a desk at the EA and ended up working more on Slad as the data was there and the properties had faced so much damage - the Ruscombe Brook problems by comparison are insignificant! See here a bit re Ilaria at our AGM and re Adam giving background to their work here. See also Adam's Bridgend summary report here.

These projects showed that attenuation ponds are a way of managing floods - this scheme will be groundbreaking and hopefully show it working in practice. Congrats to the EA for funding this - good luck to all in making it work - we can then hopefully start looking at similar schemes across the whole District to manage our water more sustainably.

See also photos from clearing out the culvert of Slad Brook here.