Floods: Learning lessons (From Witney Gazette)

Floods: Learning lessons

11:12am Monday 21st January 2008 in Witney By Thom Airs

EMERGENCY planners pledged today to learn lessons from the county's flooding alert and promised to include them in future plans.

Councillor Keith Mitchell, the leader of Oxfordshire County Council, said: "It now seems that we can be content that there will not be widespread flooding in Oxfordshire.

"However, in saying that, we must remember those people in Kelmscott and at Bablockhythe who have suffered flooding.

"There are also scores of people in the Osney and Botley Road areas of Oxford, Abingdon and other places throughout Oxfordshire who have been living on their nerves in recent days and that would have been thoroughly unpleasant.

"Our emergency planners, highways teams and firefighters have worked hard with our colleagues at district councils, the Environment Agency and the police to contain the situation we were presented with.

"We'd like to thank each of the sites in Oxfordshire that acted as hosts for sandbagging arrangements.

'Each of our organisations had acknowledged some time ago that flooding threats are going to be a more regular occurrence in Oxfordshire'

County council leader Keith Mitchell

Mr Mitchell added: "Each of our organisations had acknowledged some time ago that flooding threats are going to be a more regular occurrence in Oxfordshire.

"We will learn from the experience of the last few days and build any lessons into future plans.

"In the meantime we must now hope for a relatively dry later winter and spring so that water table levels can diminish, thus reducing the possibility of a spell of wet weather plunging us back into a difficult situation."