Biggest pumping station in UK working 'harder than ever' to keep Fenland from going underwater

The UK's biggest pumping station is working "harder than ever" in its history, say bosses, as the country deals with widespread flooding through one of the wettest winters on record.

The St Germans Pumping Station in the Cambridgeshire Fens has been discharging 77 cubic metres of water a second in the wake of Storm Henk - enough to fill an Olympic swimming pool every 30 seconds.

Those in charge of the giant station near King's Lynn said it had never needed to pump out so much water before.

But given Norfolk has already had more than two-thirds of its January rainfall in just five days and Cambridgeshire well over half, it is hardly surprising.

The six powerful pumps are designed to shift water from a network of drains across the Fens into the main river so it can run swiftly out to sea.

The station is the responsibility of the Middle Level Commissioners, one of the inland drainage boards in charge of keeping the Fens from flooding since 1862.

Chief executive Paul Burrows said: “The maximum capacity of this station is 100 cubic metres a second - that’s how much it can pump if all six pumps were working to their absolute maximum and that could pump an Olympic-sized swimming pool in 25 seconds.

"So, over the course of this week, the maximum capacity that’s been pumping has been 77 cubic metres and that’s as much water as we’ve ever pumped out of this system.

"The first pumping station was built here in 1936, so, [we have] a long history of pumping but this week it's working harder than it ever has.”

How it works: St Germans pumping station

• The station processes water from 177km of drainage dykes and ditches across the Norfolk and Cambridgeshire fens.

• All the water that falls on the Cambridgeshire and Norfolk Fens - from the A1 corridor to King's Lynn - ends up in a giant dyke at St Germans;

• It is then sucked up into the pumping station - which acts like a giant straw - pulling the water up and out through the embankment behind.

• Once the water has gone through the pumping station it is pushed out into the River Great Ouse and ends up in the Wash, and the North Sea.

• The Fens were once marshland but were drained to become farmland in the 18th century.

Mr Burrows said the pumping station was a vital part of stopping floodwater rising over the Fens.

He said: "If this pumping station wasn’t here, all the water that falls in the area between the River Nene and the Ouse washes, from the A1 corridor - right through places like March, Chatteris, Ramsey - those villages and all that land would have nowhere to send its water out to sea.

"So water would back up in the system, we’d have embankment breaches and, basically, large tracts of our much-loved Fenland area would be underwater.”

Even though the rain eased on Friday, the Middle Level Commissioners said there were still "vast quantities" of water in the system.

ITV News Anglia meteorologist Aisling Creevey said that parts of the region had already well over half January's rainfall and that Thursday had seen extremely wet weather.

She said: “Overnight there was one to two weeks’ worth of rainfall widely across the whole of the Anglia region."

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