A farmer is braced for ‘substantial financial losses’ after his fields were flooded thanks to damaged drain bank.
Ben Atkinson is facing the grim prospect of losing 200 to 240 acres of cereal crops as a result of the South Forty Foot Drain spilling over a damaged bank at Dunsby Fen on Monday as a result of the extreme weather conditions.
Mr Atkinson is another farmer, along with the Black Sluice Internal Drainage Board, who feel that flooding could have been prevented if Black Sluice Pumping Station in Boston was once again operational. It was decommissioned several years ago following a study.
Farmer Ben Atkinson is facing substation losses after his fields flooded and is also calling for the EA to re-instate the Black Sluice Pumping Station
The section of bank, along with another at Quadring, was damaged in Storm Henk in January last year and flooded ‘for the first time in living memory’ – but these have not been repaired by the Environment Agency despite assurances to do so in the autumn.
The repairs are now not due to take place until later in the spring – and Mr Atkinson said a computer model on the impact of the weakened bank collapsing was ‘frightening’ as thousands of properties and acres of land could end up under water.
He said: “The EA assured us that the bank would be repaired by October 2024. We got to October and nothing happened. They put a temporary sheeting over the damage and there was no repair work. It came to the last day of October and we were told that it was going to be repaired before April 2025.
A pumping station on the South Forty Foot Drain can be seen in the distance
“My concern, as we have just seen, is that statistically January and February are the wettest months.
“The overtopping happened on Monday and completely flooded the whole drainage network.
“On the back of EA assurances that it would be repaired in October, we have drilled the land with winter wheat and barley. We have made input purchases and the financial losses will be substantial.”
Fields are now underwater after the South Forty Foot Drain overtopped as a result of a damaged bank
Mr Atkinson said the level of losses would depend on how quickly his land is drained but has concerns about how long that will take.
The Black Sluice IDB’s pumps are now able to run again as the level of the South Forty Foot has lowered and a mobile pump has been brought in by the EA.
Mr Atkinson said: “Winter wheat could stand in it for 24 hours but the longer it goes on, it could be a complete loss.
The scale of the flooding in Dunsby Fen, as a result of the damaged South Forty Foot Drain Bank, can be seen
“It is not going to save it completely but there will be some considerable damage.
“It’s food and livelihoods and we understand that people’s homes should come first but there are solutions.”
The South Forty Foot, which dates back to the 1600s, is an important water course in South Lincolnshire as it takes water away from a large area with ‘highland water carriers’ from Bourne draining into it.
Ben Atkinson’s fields have been flooded as a result of water overtopping the damaged South Forty Foot Drain bank at Dunsby Fen
Mr Atkinson along with colleagues and the Black Sluice IDB had put forward their ideas for improving the South Forty Foot during a meeting with the EA last year.
Their ideas to prevent future flooding including reinstating the pumps at the Black Sluice Pumping Station, which only has a sluice gate to the side to allow water to drain away from the South Forty Foot at low tide but Mr Atkinson said that this method results in the drain being backed up.
Another idea is to remove the derelict pump house and replace it with a sluice gate in order to provide a larger area to evacuate water into the sea from.
But their solutions seemed to fall on deaf ears with Mr Atkinson saying the EA representative ‘kept harping back’ to the Black Sluice Catchment Area study, which resulted in the decommissioning of the pumping station.
Mr Atkinson said of re-instating the pumping station: “It would definitely work instead of only having a certain time of day, at low tide, when you can evacuate water out of the main drainage channel.
“If you can use sluice gates at low tide to get water out and when there is no great pressure on the whole system you don’t need to use the pumps. At times when there is real pressure you can not only rely on the sluice gates and pumps at high tide and take the pressure off.”
A number of people, including the Black Sluice Internal Drainage Board, have called for the EA’s original computer model to be revisted – and this is supported by Mr Atkinson.
He said: “The weather is changing. The very least modelling should be done again. Climate change appears to be happening a lot quicker than we were hoping.
“It is going to get worse and worse.”
Mr Atkinson had asked the EA to do a model on the impact of what would happen if the damaged bank at Dunsby collapsed.
He said “The model they should me was frightening as well as villages under water the amount of land would be measures in thousands of acres and affected properties would be in the hundreds if not thousands.”