As you will be aware, Storm Babet weather warnings have been issued by the Met Office and SEPA covering much of the North and East of the country, between 6am Thursday 19 October and 6pm Friday 20 October. These are available online and are updated by the Met Office and SEPA respectively:
UK weather warnings – Met Office
Flood Updates – SEPA Floodline
The warning anticipates periods of very intense rainfall which have high potential to exceed the capacity of urban drainage systems – including road gullies, surface water pipes, combined sewers and confined / culverted watercourses. As well as general surface water flooding, this can cause combined sewers to overflow with potential impacts on outdoor areas or, in the most severe cases, within customers’ homes.
You can see from the colour-coded Met Office warnings where the heaviest rainfall is more likely to occur.
Scottish Water has stepped up its preparedness, including protecting our own assets so we can safeguard services for customers, and standing up additional resource to assist customers in the areas where the risk of flooding from the sewer is highest.
What can homeowners/ occupiers do?
It is important for individual property owners to know that they have a responsibility to protect themselves and their property from flooding.
If a customer lives in a flood risk area and heavy rain is forecast, we recommend moving vehicles to higher ground, using temporary flood mitigation measures such as flood guards to protect the property and having a flood kit ready. Flood kits should include essential items such as a torch and candles, a battery phone charger, first aid kit and any necessary medicines.
Further advice and support on how to prepare for a flood, as well as live flooding updates can be found on SEPA’s Floodline website at www.floodlinescotland.org.uk
How Scottish Water can help during a flooding incident?
We encourage customers to report flooding from the sewer to us as soon as possible whenever it occurs. When a customer is affected by sewer flooding we would ask them to call us on 0800 0778 778 or log via our online portal at How to Contact Us – Scottish Water. Our customer engagement centre is open 24 hours a day.
Scottish Water will always attend to assist and clean up for customers who have experienced sewer flooding. Customers who have experienced sewer flooding within their homes are our highest priority, although response times are dependent on the extent of flooding impacts both locally and across the country.
Where sewer flooding has affected gardens or other outdoor spaces, we will attend as soon as we can, but have to prioritise those customers in greatest need of assistance.
What does Scottish Water do after flooding has occurred?
Where flooding from the sewer has occurred, we will attend to restore service to the drainage network and clean up where required.
Our response team will make an initial assessment of the cause of flooding and arrange for any identified issues with the sewer such as blockages or defects to be addressed.
Where an operational cause of flooding cannot be identified other than the high volume of stormwater entering the sewer, our Flooding Investigation Team will make an assessment of the storm’s intensity. Where internal sewer flooding has occurred, they will investigate the performance of the sewer network and the level of flood risk that affected customers are experiencing.
If the sewer network is shown to present a high level of flood risk outside of very intense storm events, we will seek to identify and pursue options to address this. The development of projects is typically very complex and takes significant time, but we will support interim measures to improve flood protection for properties where possible and these can often be put in place faster.
Scottish Water will provide the industry standard level of service which is defined as “effectually drain foul and surface water in normal rainfall events”. Where the network has been overwhelmed by an extreme storm event that exceeds the sewer network’s design capacity, Scottish Water is not able to fund work to prevent this.
We work with local authorities who develop and maintain surface water management plans, which can identify opportunities to improve the way stormwater is managed in urban areas.
We also work actively with developers to prevent connection of additional surface water to combined sewer systems unless in highly exceptional circumstances and to pursue opportunities to disconnect existing surface water where possible.
We have advice on our website including a video ‘How to prepare for a flood’. Please feel free to share this with the communities you serve.