Flood risks
extreme rainfall, especially in older homes with inadequate sub floor damp proofing
• flash flooding, where a nearby river or watercourse breaks from its banks causing brief flooding (often no more than a few hours), which enters the home through doors or the drainage system
• significant levels of water remaining inside the property, where a prolonged period of inundation occurs, such as that which affected Somerset Levels homes in late 2013
The home addresses each of these, showing possible solutions for each scenario, either to keep the water out or to allow for a rapid clean up, and to get the home back and ready to occupy in a much shorter time period following a flood. The demonstration home was created from one
‘unit’ of BRE’s Victorian Terrace project. Originally built in 1855 as the stable block to the country house ‘Bucknalls’ at the centre of BRE’s Watford site, parts of the building underwent extensive refurbishment in 2011. This was to showcase and test a whole range of solutions to bring old, solid walled Victorian homes up to modern performance standards of insulation and energy efficiency. That project saw the stable block converted
to a terrace of four small individual dwellings. While three were used to showcase refurbishment options, one was left unimproved, and was reserved for further demonstrations, providing the perfect place to create the flood resilient home.
Improving resilience Measures used
In late 2015, in response to the devastating effects of major floods in 2007, 2009, 2012, and 2013/14, BRE’s chief executive Dr Peter Bonfield was asked
The types of measures that can be taken to make a property flood resilient, and which are
by the then Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at Defra to bring commercial interests together in a roundtable, to consider how collectively they could best enable and encourage the use of property level resilience measures for buildings at risk of being flooded. This resulted in the publication (by Defra) of
the Property Flooding Resilience Action Plan in September 2016. In his chairman’s introduction, Dr Bonfield says ‘December 2015 was the wettest December on record, but also the wettest calendar month overall since records began in 1910. More than 17,000 properties were flooded or affected, including over 4,000 businesses’. By September 2016, nine months later, over 2,000 householders were still unable to return to their homes and 700 businesses were still not fully operational. Dr Bonfield added: ‘A key solution to reducing the costs of repair of homes and buildings and to reduce the misery and disruption caused by flooding to families and businesses is to install property level resilient measures into the building.’ Measures that can be installed range from simple actions, such as putting replacement electrical fittings higher up the walls and the fitting of flood resisting doors, through to larger scale repairs such as installing sub floor waterproofing. Subsequent floods in winter 2016 showed how people and businesses, whose property had been resiliently repaired after previous floods, were able to move back into their homes or have their business up and running after just a few days, rather than several months.
FOCUS
www.frmjournal.com DECEMBER 2017/JANUARY 2018
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