FLOOD SUPREMO BROUGH TO SEE PROBLEM
Heather Kidd, Shropshire Councillor for Chirbury and Worthen, this week, persuaded a high powered team from Shropshire Council to visit Millstream in Worthen to see at first hand the problems with the stream that have made life a misery for residents in recent years.
Heather said “This problem has bedevilled Worthen for long time but this year has been particularly bad with the road flooding twice this summer alone. Progress has been painfully slow solving this problem with many agencies dragging their heels and no-one willing to take decisive action.
LOCAL RESIDENTS HAVE THEIR SAY “To try and break this impasse I invited the Portfolio Holder responsible – Cllr Mal Price and the Land Drainage Officer, David Edwards, down to see the problem first hand and to speak to residents affected.
“The key to solving the problem is to widen the stream enough to cope with flooding but not have any knock on effect which would flood other properties either here or downstream. Interestingly local residents remember the stream being much wider in the 1970s – a time when flooding was unknown! In fact there is still a wall some 5 feet back from the current bank that shows the width of the stream then.
ACTION Following discussions with a number of affected residents, Cllr Price promised to speed up the necessary permissions for work to go ahead and also help look for funding from the Local Joint Committee and elsewhere to allow the work to go ahead if we can prove that the stream was wider.
Heather concluded “Key to getting this sorted is getting some proof of how the stream looked in the past before these floods started and I know many in the community are trying to find photos of the stream from before 1990. Between roads, pylons, wind turbines and floods, Worthen has suffered a lot over the past year and it’s high time we got this issue sorted.”