TRUST BUY A £13.6 MILLION FLOOD RISK

The West Herts Trust have just spent £13.6 million on an acre of land that suffers from a high risk of flooding.

And they will have to raise the floor level of a major part of the new Watford Hospital by NEARLY FIVE FEET  to make sure it doesn’t get flooded by surface water.

The Trust have had to pay that enormous sum (about four times the going rate for similar land) to accommodate the front entrance of their new tower blocks. They don’t seem to have read their own Watford General planning application from 2021, which said that:

there are some small areas of the site, predominantly at the south corner / low lying areas, which are shown at high risk of pluvial [surface water] flooding. This correlates with the existing site topography, the southern corner of the site being the lowest area of the site and, therefore surface water ponding may occur.

A ‘high risk’ – the worst category for flooding danger – means that ‘ each year this area has a chance of flooding of greater than 1 in 30 (3.3%).’ With climate change, that chance may be growing.

So the Trust’s advisers say, in the planning documents:

It is recommended that the proposed finish floor level of the building located at the south corner of the site are set at above 54.5m AOD [AOD is basically sea level] (53.00m AOD TBC +1.2m + 0.3m freeboard),
which is above the predicted probable pluvial flood level.

In plain English, that means that the front entrance of the new towering hospital will have to be 1.5 metres above the existing ground to keep patients and staff in the dry.

THIS COULD END UP BEING THE MOST EXPENSIVE POND IN THE NHS.