Danger of ‘crying wolf’ if flood warnings are made too often, says Natural Resources Wales

There could be a danger of ‘crying wolf’ if flood warnings are made too often, according to a senior figure at Natural Resources Wales.

The organisation has been criticised by some for not giving as early warning as possible in the build-up to Storm Bert which caused devastation in parts of Wales last month.

NRW’s Head of Flood Incident Risk Management, Jeremy Parr, has been questioned by Welsh MPs in the House of Commons today along with leaders of the Met Office and the Flood Forecasting Centre.

Mr Parr told the Welsh Affairs Select Committee that the Met Office issues weather warnings while NRW issues flood warnings.

He said: "During those storms we issued a large number of flood warnings across large parts of Wales, and the messaging around flood warnings is important, and that consistency of messaging is important.

"We are really conscious of not crying wolf too often and losing the message. So it would be really easy to have a lower threshold for issuing warnings, for example, but with a lot less certainty. And there's a real danger there that people say, ‘well, it didn't happen, so therefore I don't really trust it for next time, next time around.’"

He also added that the message needs to be clearer that people have to take responsibility for acting on warnings.

“Public organisations are there to serve, but people also need to take some personal ownership of it. It's not a pleasant or easy thing to say, but it's the reality. What I'm not saying there is [that] they need to sort it out themselves. That's totally not what I’m saying. But they need to recognise that the risk is there.”

Simon Brown, Service Director at the Met Office, was asked if his organisation’s weather warnings, used by NRW to make its own warnings, were clear enough.

'Hindsight is a wonderful thing'

He said: "The impacts from that meeting were well understood by the respondent community. They were well prepared to respond, and the local council for Rhondda Cynon Taf actually said they prepared like it was an amber. So they think the impacts were well understood. People have understood our narrative.

"Hindsight is a wonderful thing. We will certainly look at whether that weather warning was appropriate.

“One of the things we are going to look at is, are there rare occasions because of the volume of rainfall, that we step outside our National Severe Weather volume practice guide, but we are going to look at that and we will not do that lightly.”

Russell Turner, Head of Centre at the Flood Forecasting Centre, told the MPs that severe floods are now “increasingly likely.”

He said: "I’ve been involved in flood forecasting for 15 years and it is relentless. I would describe it as we have a series of events… We've had five years which have been extremely busy.

"It's difficult to benchmark exactly, but I think these are increasingly likely events and familiar for a lot of communities, unfortunately."

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