It has been reported to FFAG that some Freuchie Mill residents are oblivious to how close we were to another major flooding disaster in the early hours of Sunday morning. This blog post will provide some more detail on the decision making and events of Sunday morning.

Committee members of FFAG stood at the side of the culvert whilst debating the point at which we would sound the flood warning alarm (airhorn). In light of the early hour, or late hour depending on your skew, we decided on a fairly high water level mark that would still facilitate sufficient time for residents to safely move cars and other property to areas of safety. The Pitilock Burn rose to within 3 inches of that point or about an estimated 30 minutes of rainfall. This warning level would still have allowed about another hour before flooding would have occurred across Freuchie Mill. Thankfully the rainfall reduced and the water level started to slowly fall.

Residents who were aware of the ongoing drama decided to move their property early and fully deploy all their flood defences during this event. Flooding looked to be only hours away based on what we were seeing unfold in front of our own eyes!

We’ve received praise and thanks from a few residents for how useful the images from the webcameras were to them. Our webstats show a 500% increase in normal traffic for Saturday and Sunday with a peak on Sunday of 140 pageviews for the webcamera page. The way this service is delivered will be changing in the near future. More on this in a future blog post.

This incident also highlights the weather forecast for Freuchie was wrong. Anyone who looked at the online forecasts or the TV broadcast will know they weren’t predicting this amount of rainfall for Fife, never mind Freuchie. Normally the meteorologist do a magnificent job but on this occasion they fell short of the mark for us.

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