DREDGING the River Weaver ‘wasn’t an issue for the flood risk’ when solutions were examined, according to a senior Environment Agency officer.

That’s according to one of Cheshire’s Environment Agency Flood Risk Senior Advisers, who was speaking following the visit of Environment Secretary George Eustice to Northwich.

Dave Brown told the Local Democracy Reporting Service: “When we were building the defence, and we really looked hard at the dredging because it came up as an issue, Weaver is a navigation so it’s operated by Canal and Rivers Trust so there’s a series of lock-gates.

“What we looked at, we looked at saying ‘if the silt levels built up, what impact would that have on flood risk’.

“What we found was that, that wasn’t a significant element — the more significant element was the water levels that effectively get caught by the infrastructure.

“Dredging wasn’t an issue for the flood risk, and we had looked at it really closely when we looked at the flooding solutions.”

READ MORE >> Environment Secretary says flood defences 'did work'

Mr Brown added that the situation is made more complex by the fact that the Weaver is a navigation, meaning there are ‘certain standards for drafts for navigation’ with lock-gates.

Earlier in the day, George Eustice told media that Northwich’s £7 million flood defences, installed in 2016, ‘did work’ and ‘held back the river’.

He added: “What we saw here as in some other areas, with such high rainfall — more rain in 48 hours than we would see in the entire month of January — was a lot of surface water, the drainage system couldn’t cope, which is why we have had to bring some additional pumping equipment to get the water back into the river.”

When asked by the LDRS what actions needed to be taken to avoid a similar situation happening again, Dave Brown said: “That’s a really good question. The thing is, we don’t want to be doing this again, in 2019 we had a similar issue so I think there has to be a really good understanding of how that system works.

“It seems that there needs to be a shared understanding between all those involved, between the local authority, United Utilities, ourselves, to work out exactly what we need to do to try and mitigate this and to invest where appropriate, draw down the funding as appropriate to just avoid this occurring again.

A summary of the situation from Local Democracy Reporter Ethan Davies

“There’s a lot of infrastructure that dates back 90 to 100 years that’s still being utilised, and possibly doesn’t have the capacity.

“We have got to highlight the amount of rainfall we saw — as the secretary of state said, a month’s rainfall — it overwhelmed the systems beyond the design capacity of what the systems could do anyway.

“I think all of those things compounded so going forward, we need to understand and we need to get a proper plan in place and invest as appropriate, and manage it as appropriate.”