Bucks County Council reveals what it is doing to combat heavy rainfall and floods

The council's transport arm, Transport for Bucks (TfB), says it has had a challenging few months dealing with "extreme" rainfall.

TfB says it has been tough keeping on top of the "significant" extra work needed to clear sites where flooding or standing surface water appears.

The team says often, the problems are with underground drainage pipes - or more recently, a lot of water trying to enter the drain at once, overwhelming the system.

Gullies and pipes can also become blocked with debris - particularly during autumn leaf fall.

What has TfB been doing to tackle wet weather and flooding?

- As well as 29 drainage schemes, the highway maintenance teams carry out a range of activities including routine gully clearing to keep the drainage flowing.

- An additional machine was brought in by TfB for a twelve week period in order to supplement the efforts of the three full time teams in the depots in the north and south of the county.

- New gully machines have been purchased to upgrade existing ones, operating from the depots at Aylesbury, High Wycombe and Amersham. This will double the number of gully emptiers active on the network between April and June - which TfB say will combat the effects of the winter period and preparing the network for the autumn and winter weather of 2020/21.

- A new asset management software system (GullySMART) is now in use to manage over 79,000 gullies in Buckinghamshire. The system combines mobile technology with mapping data, available on a hand held device and building a forward looking profile of required maintenance based upon historical knowledge of attendance and condition. This technology will enable TfB to build a picture of the condition of the gully data, which will ultimately lead to a more focussed ‘needs based’ approach to the gully-clearing programme, concentrating on those gullies that need more frequent cleansing.

- The TfB team has also created a 'matrix' to prioritise planned drainage projects. The matrix is completed to score each proposed scheme against a set of criteria - which includes road safety, property damage, local reports and time weighting. From this matrix a rolling programme of works is developed with roughly 30 schemes prioritised for delivery each year.

2019 was a particularly busy one for the teams - with 29 drainage schemes carried out to try and improve flooding in different areas.

One of those areas is Eastern Dene in Hazlemere - where a "complex" drainage problem was solved by upgrading the entire system in June last year.

Increased gulley maintenance has been carried out on the A404 and new boreholes have been created.

A 300mm pipe under the A404 has also been created to allow the overspill of surface water to cross the road.

Ironically the drainage programme was hampered by extreme periods of heavy rainfall - with "persistent" wet weather starting in mid-August causing major disruption to the plan.

Mark Shaw deputy leader and cabinet member for transportation keeps a keen eye on all work in progress to manage flooding and said: "I am satisfied that this two pronged approach to gully clearing plus major schemes to address the more problem areas of highway flooding will have a significant impact however, we can’t get complacent.

"I am pleased that we will also be adding an additional £1 million to the routine gully clearing programme from April 2020.

"We will have an extra three gully machines on the network between April and June giving us six machines to get ahead of ourselves this year, should we experience another wet autumn."

The drainage matrix