Flooding threat sparked Grands Vaux evacuation plan, say emergency services

Tuesday 18 February 2014

Emergency services were considering evacuating people from Grands Vaux over flooding fears at the height of this month’s storms.

A “Cobra-style” meeting of emergency services was called to deal with the risk of flooding as high tides, saturated ground conditions and heavy rainfall expected to be a “one in 120 year event” threatened to combine to create a potential disaster.

Officials have stressed that there is no issue about the integrity of the dam at Grands Vaux that towers over a primary school and houses, but say that that the combination of prolonged rainfall, the high tide stopping water flowing freely away through culverts and the deluge expected on 6 February had raised serious concerns.

In the event, the worst of the weather missed Jersey and hit Guernsey.

The emergency meeting was attended by officers from the uniformed services, the Met Office, TTS, Housing, Education and Health, and the Red Cross were put on “standby”.

In a statement issued through the States Communications Unit, officials confirmed that they had come close to evacuating people from the area.

The statement said: “The level of evacuation would have depended entirely on the flooding anticipated given the changing conditions at the time.

“The meeting was called because there was the potential for an unusually heavy amount of rain over a very short period of time.

“The rainfall that had originally been forecast for the evening of Thursday 6 February was about a one in 120 year event.

“As it happened, the risk diminished throughout the day and as updates to forecasts were made it became apparent that the worst of the weather would remain to the northwest of Jersey.

“We have robust plans in place for dealing with severe weather events such as those being experienced in the UK. Fortunately on this occasion we did not have to fully activate these plans.”