East Devon communities urged to create emergency plans after record rainfall

People in East Devon are being urged to create emergency response plans in case of extreme weather.

Severe weather across the district in the past 18 months has caused several notable incidents, including flash floods in the Otter Valley in May 2023, and Storm Ciaran in November, which damaged Exmouth’s sea wall.

Matt Blythe, who helps oversee environment and climate change-related activities at East Devon District Council, said Met Office data showed England recently experienced the wettest 18-month period since 1836.

He said this had contributed to some of the recent events in the district, and showed the need to be prepared.

“There’s a lot of unseen, back-office work required for these type of plans and we have had a couple of relatively large events,” he said.

“We had around 400 weather message warnings in the 2023/24 financial year, and we are trying to get those out to staff and officers so they are aware if they are out and about in the district.

“We also send them on to parish and town clerks, especially for amber warnings and above, to help ensure we’re communicating as widely as possible.”

Several councillors said they are already involved in creating emergency plans in their own communities.

Cllr Geoff Jung (Liberal Democrat, Woodbury and Lymptone), portfolio holder for coast, country and environment said: “Anything we can do to encourage communities that don’t have a plan like this to create one is worth doing.

“I run my own community resilience group in my village and I go to a lot of the meetings, and any community that could have problems with flooding really needs to have a group set up so it can react when a flood happens.”

He added: "If there are 20 or 30 communities flooded, the fire brigade can’t get to everyone, so people have to work with what they have got and having a community resilience group with a plan, and people who know what to and when, really does work."

It is thought that roughly 60 East Devon communities have such plans, but scrutiny committee vice chair Cllr Duncan Mackinder (Liberal Democrat, Yarty) proposed a motion that communities without resilience plans be encouraged to create them.

“It’s been pretty obvious from this debate how important they are,” he said.

Credit: Bradley Gerrard / LDRS