FLIMBY WOODS

The village of Flimby suffers from surface flooding caused by overwhelmed and constricted drainage systems that flow through and under the coastal habitation. The project was developed with West Cumbria Rivers Trust and funded by Environment Agency and Defra’. The brief was to create a variety of leaky dams in the woods above using onsite materials. This minimised cost and meant heavy machinery was not required to move materials onto or around the site.

The image shows one of our innovative NFM interventions designed to slow the flow by increasing channel roughness through the accumulations of coarse woody debris during spate events. This involved using larch felled onsite to construct 15 leaky dams that work at different points of flow to slow and capture high flows respectively.

The site is being monitored by  West Cumbria Rivers Trust (remote video) and Lancaster University (NERC Q-NFM) using a flow gauging station. It was used at the recent conference hosted by the BHS ‘does natural flood management work?’ as a case study.