Shropshire Council and Severn Trent Leave Residents in lurch as floods hit.

TOTALLY INADEQUATE
Shropshire Council and Severn Trent Leave Residents in lurch as floods hit.
Heather Kidd has slammed both Shropshire and Severn Trent Water for their totally inadequate response to this weekend’s floods across the County.
Heather said “It was totally pathetic. I spent most of Saturday morning trying to get some assistance for vulnerable residents in my ward only to repeatedly hit a blank wall.”
In the Worthen area the B4386 was blocked by floodwater in several places. In the village itself the stream burst its banks and threatened sheltered housing with flooding, whilst in the next road raw sewage backed up into gardens. Heather attempted sandbags from several organisations to stop floodwater and sewage getting in to properties.
She tried to contact the following:
Shropshire Council – Customer Services. After a long wait she got through to someone who offered her sand bags IF she could come and get them. When she explained that the road was blocked (she had tried a number of routes in her ward) the answer was still the same followed by a ” Well that’s it then. Nothing we can do.”
Severn Trent. She tried by phone and chat line to report the sewage outflow but could not get through. Even the chat line went down and was unavailable from 2.30pm.
Connexus Housing Association (who own the sheltered housing). Heather rang the Association and hung on for 40 minutes with no response. She asked for help from facebook and eventually got through to a member of staff at the housing association who contacted their boss.
Heather said:
” I’m grateful that the Fire brigade helped and a flagged down highways vehicle who dropped off some sand bags.
“This is not the first time we have been faced with this. The first was a few years ago when I rang to ask to get a road closed because a bridge was falling into the water. I faced similar issues then and they would not even contact local police about it. So then I was forced to do it
“It is pretty clear that none of these organisations had any effective contingency planning to deal with threats to venerable people in extreme weather episodes like we have just experienced
“We are facing more extreme weather events like this in the future as the climate changes. When we have event such as this rain there are bound to be glitches and hold ups but I do expect that the public have a set of clear and effective contacts that they can ring.
“I have written to the Chief Executives of Shropshire, Connexus and Severn Trent and Severn Trent on this issue. This is simply not good enough, action needs to be taken before lives are lost.”

NOTE: There is an Emergency planning department with a phone number but Customer services were unaware of it. If you use that out of hours you need to be directed to an on call number. This should be available at Customer services.