Author: Alex Conacher

Supporter: WSP

Residents of the small fishing town of Looe in Cornwall have been campaigning for a flood defence scheme for over 20 years, to shield them from flooding that gets worse every year.

It all began20,000 years ago when the last Glacial Maximum came to an end and deglaciation began.Great ice sheets that had once buried northern Europe began to retreat. Sea levels began to rise, and the green of new life crept northwards. But another process had already begun.The crushing weight of up to 3km of ice had until then been pressing down on the very crust of the Earth. The immense force of this had deformed the crust downwards, displacing the mantle below it and raising the crust of regions not covered by ice. This downwards force had been removed, allowing the crust to return to its previous shape. The northern regions of Europe began to rise, while nearby southern regions began to sink, in a process known as isostatic rebound.

The seesaw effect

In the UK, the practical effect of this is like a seesaw. Scotland has been rising by 2mm per year, the north of England by 1mm per year, the midlands are level, south of this is rising by 1mm per year and the extreme south by 2mm per year. And it is thought that this could continue for thousands of years. So rising sea levels and more frequent, more extreme weather events as a result of climate change mean that the people living on the south coast of England are caught between rising seas and sinking land. People like Tina Hicks. “I am a local girl. My dad’s family came from Looe, and my mum’s family came from Polperro,” she says. “Back in the good old days, they weren’t supposed to do the courting business because one community didn’t speak to the other. But thankfully for my part, my mum and dad obviously went courting.”

Polperro and Looe are both coastal towns, less than 10km apart. Both are beautiful.  “I spent a lot of my youth out on the sea in in various boats and fishing and not really being very ladylike more of a tomboy, really. I had a fantastic upbringing,” says Tina who today is the Harbourmaster for Looe, which means that no two days are the same. “The role is really defined by the port in which you work. So every harbourmaster role is unique. And you find yourself some days doing very mundane things. And other days you could be working on multimillion pound projects like we are with the one we’re working on at the moment, which is our flood defence and resilience project.”

Flooded by sea and river

Tina has lost count of how often the town floods. “We have the storm surges, which obviously come in from the sea. And then we have the sea level rises,” she explains. “So on a windy day if the winds in the wrong direction, and potentially we flood from the sea. But because we’re based at the bottom of the valley, if we have an awful lot of rain, we can potentially be flooded from the river side of things as well.”

Steep valleys surround Looe regularly channelling rainwater into the town which has had regular flooding for decades, in fact longer. Tina’s family talk of storm boards that were in place for 10 months of the year and in the past people got used to being inundated but the situation has gotten much, much worse.

“The severity is much greater than it’s ever been. And now, people are starting to struggle. And people are questioning whether it’s viable to start businesses here,” says Tina

Businesses are struggling to get insurance so must bear the brunt of flooding costs, which estimates place at £39M over the past five years alone. People are leaving, or planning to. Looe is in danger of losing its people. Tina says the situation has felt hopeless until now.

“Harbour commissioners have been looking into flood defence schemes and solutions to the problems that we experience in Looe for about 20 years. And there are various schemes that have been investigated.”

But each time they seemed to come to a dead end. That was until they started working with Cornwall Council, the Environment Agency and WSP on the new scheme. “We now feel that we have a scheme that not only would prevent and protect the town for the next approximately 100 years from the flooding problems that we’re experiencing, but also allow significant economic regeneration for the town,” says Tina

Time to call in the engineers

“The approach that we’re adopting at the moment is twofold. One is to try and reduce the size of the waves that hit the town and can run up the river. And for that, we’re looking at some form of offshore breakwater. And secondly, we’re trying to stop the water flowing into the town, there are a couple of approaches that we could have adopted here,” says Hamish Hall, head of profession for water at WSP UK.He spends his days trying to help people reduce the risk of flooding, whether that’s on the sea, or inland.

One option for protection is to raise the existing walls around the town but this was discounted as they would need to be up to 2m high. “So we are taking a bold and probably quite expensive measure to try and stop the water coming up the river. And so we’ll be looking at a tidal barrage. Under most events, most days it will be open, and people will become able to move freely, and the river will be able to act normally.”

But if a very high tide, or storm, or both is forecast, the barrage would be shut to stop the tidal water coming into town. There would also be a cut-off defence behind the beach to stop the groundwater coming in. Currently the locations are undecided as this requires consultation with the fishermen and other locals.

Offshore and onshore ground investigations are also underway. “We have a perfect mixed bag of geology. We have some good competent rock on one side,” says Hamish “And so we’re lucky there that the one half of our tidal barrage and breakwater will probably be founded on strong, competent rock. And then as we go east, we have relic beach made ground, old quarry material, rubbish, all sorts of stuff. And so on the eastern side, which is far more permeable and mixed in terms of geology and made ground. “

This isrecognised as a technical risk to the project. “Of course, we need to, we need to fix that before we go forward. But in the main, the below ground works properly, be the cut-off wall to stop, saline ingress. And that, hopefully, will be a relatively simple sheet piling operation where we don’t have to disturb too much in the ground.”

Currently the team is going through the costing to decide whether the breakwater will be rock armour or caisson, or a mix of armour and caisson to work out how to build what is quite a large structure, considering that the waves can be up to five metres high offshore. Another possibility is that this breakwater could be designed to become a habitat for marine and bird life.

Pushing for protection

Despite the need for the project being around for the past decades, the current push has only been going on for six months, and Hamish had a baptism of fire was a ‘quiet meeting’ with the fishing fleet and tourist community just before Christmas. The first project visuals had come out and Hamish says that although they were broadly welcomed there were lots of questions and concerns from people

who live and breathe Looe Harbour and river. “That meeting once again demonstrated to me that although I profess to be an expert, and a civil engineer with all the right qualifications, actually, there are no experts. And it’s a group of individuals that have to come together to decide what’s right and what’s best for our community, it can’t be decided by one set of experts,” says Hamish.

Technical feasibility is important but another challenge of this scheme is to secure the funding and this means that the economic argument needs to be won. That means making sure that the scheme regenerates the town as well as protecting it. So for example, while the breakwater is going to stop waves, it’s could also be a place for tourist vessels or a fast ferry to berth or maybe a walkway could be put along either side.

To give this scheme the best chance of being approved for funding, the Environment Agency is lending its expertise. And it has been involved with past attempts at solving Looe’s problems. It says that this time the approach is different.“This time, we’re now taking it wider in terms of ‘what does the solution really need to be? and also what does the community want it to be? And so that’s why we’re taking a different approach this time,” says Tom Fletcher, Strategic Projects Manager for the Environment Agency, with the team focusing on Devon, Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly.

The Environment Agency has gotten fully involved with this scheme and has responsibilities in regulation, funding, advising the project and making sure that the environment is protected. “And that way we can help the project partnership understand what hurdles, we might have to get through in order to get some of the funding that the project wants,” says Tom.

Finding funding

Flood schemes are expensive for small towns. The Looe scheme is expected to come in at £74 million. There is a need to convince the government that money provided for such a scheme will provide a worthwhile return, meaning eventual tax revenues from a boosted economy. Tom says you’re always looking at the economic impact of flooding “That’s then part of your justification for receiving your flood defence grant and aid. However, the regeneration side perhaps, is more recent. And that’s been about looking at how an area will grow economically as a result of the installation of your flood risk management measures.”

For Tom, a lot of this is about business confidence for businesses both old and new. “Then that will generate a business and it’ll generate jobs. But importantly, it will also generate tax receipts, okay for the Exchequer, which then goes back into the national economy,” says Tom.

Tina thinks that demonstrating economic growth potential shouldn’t be a problem. “We’ve got large areas of land that lie directly beside or adjacent to the river, which at the moment get flooded on such a regular basis that we can’t build on them. We can’t do anything with them. They are just empty pieces of land. So with this scheme, it’s going to be developing those areas into things that will create economic regeneration for the town, bring more businesses here, and give some stability to what we’ve got already,” she says.

The town even has ambitions to become the centre of a local hub with Looe at the centre of an emerging network of transport improvements for southeast Cornwall. Looe might even benefit from the present boom in remote working, with many people and businesses based in London looking to relocate to more picturesque locations.But how long will it take to realise the project? “The longer we take to get a scheme planned, permitted, tended designed and built, the more times Looe’s going to flood. So the whole team are trying to move this project forward as quickly as possible. But without cutting corners, because every year that we don’t provide protection for Looe, they’re inevitably going to have that two to five flood events.”

“So we’re looking at the outline business case, which is where we hopefully secure the funding for this project and get approval and outline for the scheme to be completed at the end of this year, we will then move into a, an up to a two-year process for legal process to flow through.”

And it could be up to two years for the environmental impact assessment and the harbour act amendment to come through, during which time the team will be undertaking detailed design.

“Which means that in three years from now, I would hope that we’ll be breaking ground. So beginning the construction of this rather important flood defence and community enhancement scheme,” says Hamish.