VIA East Midlands uses new investigation machinery on Victorian drain on Moor Lane, East Stoke

New machinery found that two different utility providers installed their services through a village’s Victorian drain.

The CCTV highway drainage investigation that took place yesterday (March 17) at Moor Lane in East Stoke revealed that the utility services installation could be contributing to the village’s yearly flooding problem.

Nottinghamshire county councillors attended the works led by VIA East Midlands as they investigated the existing system and found out the reasons why it isn’t coping and what can be done to improve the drainage.

The works were conducted by VIA’s new and bigger tanker, which is capable of jetting at high pressure, and a new camera vehicle which means they can do all surveying in-house.

Nottinghamshire County Council cabinet member for Transport and Environment, Neil Clarke said: “Flooding has always been a big issue and it’s devastating for families, and we as the county council have been putting in a lot of extra investments into flood prevention and investigation.”

According to Mr Clarke, the county council has invested nearly £5m in flood investigation work and a further £500,000 has been spent on a new fleet of tankers.

He added: “Obviously you can’t guarantee anything in life, but we hope sincerely that this sort of investigation work and flood clearance work will much improve flood prevention and hopefully there will be fewer floods around.”

From the investigation conducted, it appeared that the installation of the utility pipes through the culvert could have contributed to a build-up of debris along the bottom of the culvert.

Matt Duckworth, the drainage manager for VIA East Midlands, believes that the village’s historic flooding problems could have to do with teams previously dealing with the drains’ excess water rather than investigating the cause of the problem.

“If anything gets washed into the culvert, it will catch onto that and then it starts to form a dam and then the culvert stops to work effectively and when it gets blocked, water will come up and overlap instead of running through the culvert,” he explained.

“So the debris that naturally will flow through the culvert will get caught on those services causing a blockage.”

A further investigation found a significant pipe incursion at the junction of Fosse Road and Moor Lane, which is likely to be contributing to flooding in the village.

The team will now pinpoint the location where the service has gone through, mark it on the road and ask the utility services to move it out of the culvert.

Tony Sharpe, who has lived on Moor Lane for 20 years, said that the floods in the village are terrible and that despite having had the drains cleaned in the past, it never stopped the rainfall from causing floods, especially during Storm Babet in October 2023 and Storm Henk in January 2024.

“The lady at the end of the bungalow was totally flooded out and the repairs cost around £80,000,” he said.

“The people in Brownlow Close had water up to the joints and there was nowhere for the water to go.

“We don’t really know whether the works that are being carried out will actually make a difference, but it seems to me that we get that much water runoff from the farmland that the system can’t cope.

“But we can only hope it works this time.”

The team is planning to implement a drainage improvement scheme in the village later this year and when the road is closed for the scheme, VIA will invite the utilities services to divert the discovered pipes.

In the future, the new equipment will be used in other villages across Nottinghamshire, prioritising the ones where flooding is an issue.

Mr Duckworth said: “We always work on a risk-based approach, where there is a danger to highway users and where there is a risk of internal flooding to property.

“It is important to make sure we prioritise our resources in those locations.”

Sue Saddington, Conservative county council member for Farndon and Trent ward, said: “I think it’s great for the village because there have been a lot of complaints throughout the years, it’s not just recently that they have drainage problems here.

“I think the residents will at last be free from the risk of flooding and flooding which is always a problem in all villages in this area as soon as we get rain.”