A boss of Wales’ environmental agency Natural Resources Wales has been grilled by MPs on its actions during recent bad weather. Jeremy Parr, who is head of flood incident risk management, told a Commons committee that people need to be prepared such as by having a radio and batteries in their home.
Answering a question from MPS on the Welsh Affairs select committee about what measures are taken to communicate with people impacted by power cuts and a loss of mobile phone signal, as happened during the most recent Storm Darragh, Mr Parr said their main way of communicating with people is via the media or by sending alerts to those who have signed up via their website but those rely on power or phone signal.
“I think in terms of loss of power, again it’s business continuity planning and thinking ‘what if’. What if you were to lose power. I live and work in Wales and was well aware there were large bits of Wales that did lose power. Certainly in more western areas and we had some of our staff out of contact as well. It’s important there are contingencies in place, and back-ups and people we can turn to.
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“Quite a lot of our message to the public does depend on websites, mobile phone coverage, those sorts of things. So I think again, it’s ultimately important people have things like radios with batteries in them for example to get the latest information and news. It’s just thinking through ‘what if’ and if it were to happen ‘where would I get the information from’.”
In the meeting, Mr Parr said there is not one single thing that needs to be done to stop flooding but risks can be managed. “We can’t stop all the rain or all flooding,” he says. They can invest in flood defences but “it’s all the other things as well, looking at planning decisions and where we put people in the first place, and making sure we don’t put more people at flood risk through planning decisions. It’s about sharing that information about flood risk and working with communities to see what the risk means and how to respond to it. The warnings is part of it but the warning is only as good as what happens when people are in receipt of it.” For our free daily briefing on the biggest issues facing the nation, sign up to the Wales Matters newsletter here
“Really, the future is about building in resilience,” he said. He adds there will need to be adaptations and “how do we manage these huge quantities of water.”
The Met Office were represented by Simon Brown. He was asked about criticism of the agency in terms of whether it issued a severe enough warning for Storm Bert. He said severe warnings are issued when there is likely to be “impactful weather” based on a “likelihood and impact matrix”. He says they work with partners – with rain that would be Natural Resources Wales and the Flood Forecasting Centre. They also work with aviation or transport agencies.
Mr Brown says in relation to Storm Bert there was two weeks beforehand of dry weather which meant the soil had dried out. When the impact assessment was carried out “meteorologically there was a lot of rain but actually the antecedal soil conditions suggested there wasn’t going to be as much flooding.”
With Darragh, he says there had been a “very wet period” leading up to it. He said there was a “multi hazard” approach given the impact Bert had already had, but Darragh was focussed on wind with some pockets of rain.
“In terms of preparedness our messages were really clear, along with our partners, that significant localised flooding was possible and we did see that and it was fairly widespread. I would say this isn’t just about the warning system but responder system but what the local community do in terms of taking action,” Mr Brown said.