You published a message from two of us about the Oxford flood scheme (21 April 2022), and on Friday your sister paper published Prof Riki Therivel’s letter setting out her environmental agenda (Oxford Mail 13 May).
Encouragingly we are seeing no environmental objection to the upstream 600 metres of flood channel, getting extra water past Botley Road – phew! because this is vital to residents and businesses in West Oxford.
For the downstream extremity there is also good news. Prof Therivel mentions Kendall Copse, but the application says that work cannot start there until the Copse is no longer a construction compound for the bypass bridge.
So that sounds like an environmental issue for the bypass, not the flood scheme? That leaves Kennington Pit, where the good news is that one of us (Jonathan Madden) has an offer from the regional director of Network Rail (NR) to `play our part if required‘ should `changes’ be made. An extra 10% predicted climate-change flooding since 2017 is precisely that `change', and Jonathan is therefore making NR’s offer available to the flood scheme, with or without his pumped pipeline, avoiding not just Kennington Pit but all of residential Kennington.
From Prof Therivel’s agenda this leaves 3.5km of meadowland.
In 2019 an independent research scientist asked the Environment Agency to run a flow model with `no-channel‘ meaning no excavation, and we now see that in three out of five meadowland locations the `no-excavation’ design brings equal or lower flood levels compared to the Scheme’s experimental and controversial 2-stage channel. So here we are saying that the remedy is to use the existing channels.
Chris Sugden, Jonathan Madden, Brian Durham
Oxford