Flood Warnings and Alerts
Flood warnings and alerts for 3 catchment areas. Click the warning/alert for more information or view the 5-day flood risk map.
Operations Centre (HQ)
This will be at the Womens Institute (WI) opposite the Magna Pub. Contact is Peter Cross on 07946 522629. Anyone wanting to help should go to the Old Ship where Peter will let you know of properties that need help. If you need help call Peter.
Cocker Beck
When the Cocker Beck gauge goes above 0.6m start putting on your first level of flood defences. While it has never flooded when the Beck just reaches 0.6m, the beck could go higher (due to past or future rainfall in the catchment area) so use this as a trigger to do something to protect your property.
Dover Beck
Link to Updates on 23 Dec 2020 event
Below are a series of links to provide information in the event of a likely flood. We plan to develop this into a dashboard to show all info on one page.
Weather Forecasts
You can download the Met Office app to your phone here
Weather Forecasts do differ so use the one you ‘believe’ in. The Accuweather forecast is usually very accurate within their 120 minute window (handy for knowing when the rain will stop – but remember the rain that falls upstream takes a while to reach Lowdham so the beck can rise for at least an hour after rain stops).
The Met Office have explained that certain clouds (Cumulonimbus) are worse than others at causing large downfalls. Here is a picture of what these look like Cumulonimbus Clouds and the Wiki definition is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cumulonimbus_cloud.Clouds do not have to be black to contain large amounts of rainfall. It depends on the conditions and process of cloud formation for example how the water particles coalesce, the speed with which it happens, whether there are ice particles and all this in turn is all directly connected to what is happening in the upper atmosphere. Some clouds can look really threatening but produce nothing at all. Cumulonimbus clouds more often than not will produce precipitation but not necessarily during their decaying phase.
Ground Saturation
The condition of the ground determines how much rainwater seeps into the ground or runs off. The term the EA use is Soil Moisture Deficiency. The EA do publish weekly rainfall summaries which are useful in determining how much rain has fallen.
This is published here
Blocked Drains
FLAG monitors the status of drains and key assets in the area. This is shown on the ‘Lowdham Culverts’ layer on the map (accessible from https://lowdhamvolunteers.org/flooding/ )