Freuchie experienced the most rainfall in a while yesterday. Approximately 24mm of rain fell in 9 hours, with most of the total falling in a 7 hour spell of moderate steady rainfall.

The culvert at Freuchie Mill rose considerably during this rainfall event. As has been previously highlighted, a rainfall rate of 3mm per hour will see the level of the Pitilock Burn rise to alarming levels incredibly quickly at Freuchie Mill.

Thankfully other watercourses in Freuchie tend to take longer or require more rainfall to raise the same level of alarm or lead onto flooding.

Thanks to Cockermouth Flood Action Group and others for their kind thoughts posted on our Facebook updates yesterday.

Falkland once again experienced flooding last Saturday evening. This is a very scary occurrence as the rainfall measured by the Freuchie Mill weather station was only about 10mm for the full day. This level of rainfall really shouldn’t be causing flood events!

Local resident Betty Gilchrist supplied the above photos and the following update to FFAG:

After a great lot of thunder in the afternoon with no rain, after 5.p.m. it did rain but nothing much to talk about, then suddenly at the back of 8 o’clock this water suddenly arrived by 10 o’clock it had greatly subsided. During the time of the flooding it managed to get in to the house of Bridge-end, they do have a  flood gate but as they only moved into the house a few weeks ago were not expecting this to happen in the summer. Burnside cottage did have their floodgate on and prevented them from having water in their house. As my house sits a bit higher I was lucky again, but the day might come. The water from the burn does not burst its banks  in Balmblae it bursts it’s banks in the West Loan park and runs along the road and into the houses in Balmblae.

Once again a flood event occurs in the highest priority area in Fife waiting for a flood study. Time for Fife Council to get this important investigation work out of the way to allow prevention and protection measures to be put in place for Falkland and Freuchie.

FFAG must apologise for the Freuchie Mill weather station being down for the last few weeks. Unfortunately the engineer who looks after this system was unavailable to bring the system back online. Luckily there wasn’t too much call for the service during this period of downtime; Mother Nature was kind to us the last few weeks. The system has been updated and brought back online today.

This service will shortly be moving to new server infrastructure at which time it will become a subscription service for access to up to date weather data. More details to follow once the new system is ready.

Gilmartin has been working away for the last week or two reinstating the culvert outflow area at Freuchie Mill. The section of damaged culvert pipe, which was flattened by the collapsed gabion baskets back in August 2008, has been cut out and replaced with a new section. This should hopefully give a small improvement in the amount of water the culvert can handle.

 
Photos: Gilmartin working on the Freuchie Mill culvert outflow reinstatement

The workmen are currently working on extending the outflow pipe and constructing new substantial gabion baskets to a higher standard than the original construction in the 1990s.

Sadly these extensive works will bring only a negligible flood risk improvement.

The new Freuchie Mill flood barrier gets a great write-up in this week’s Fife Herald.

You can also check the online version.

The Courier has done another outstanding job of highlighting the flood risk present in Freuchie in today’s article about the new automatic flood barrier installed at Freuchie Mill. This new flood protection measure protects three Kingdom Housing Association properties from being deluged in another August 2008 type flood event.

Freuchie Flood Action Group pointed out the flood risk in this area, recommending a flood wall, a flood barrier and a pump be installed at this location. Kingdom Housing took our evidence and recommendation along to their flood consultants to come up with a design which implemented two of our three recommendations. Menzies were appointed as the contractor who fitted backflow valves, automatic airbricks, floodgates, constructed the flood wall and installed the automatic flood barrier manufactured by UK Flood Barriers – the first installation of its kind in Scotland.  In flood prevention and protection project terms this is a small and relatively inexpensive project that has massively improved the flood protection for three Freuchie Mill dwellings and added protection from sewer flooding to all Kingdom Housing Association properties.

Working with Kingdom Housing Association and their consultants we have identified further reasonable priced drainage improvements that would make a massive difference to the flood risk at Freuchie Mill. Our proposals would implement the drainage recommendations made by Fife Regional Council when Freuchie Mill was still being planned back in the 1990’s. Cllr MacDiarmid has been trying for some time to organise a meeting with Fife Council officers and other stakeholders to look at our proposals.

p.s. The press release prepared by UK Flood Barriers mentioned a nursing home hence the error in today’s newspaper article! There isn’t a nearby nursing home.

UPDATE: Article now online at http://www.thecourier.co.uk/News/Fife/article/12680/freuchie-mill-the-first-community-in-scotland-to-introduce-a-passive-flood-defence-system.html

Following the mini-flood event on Friday, FFAG made a couple of suggestions to the owners of Freuchie Mill House on how to reduce the risk of flooding by blocked drainage grids. The owners have responded to our suggestions incredibly quickly, putting in place a couple of new adhoc trash screens  that should help to reduce the amount of debris being washed down to the drainage grid.

The residents of Freuchie Mill thank you for your assistance, hard work and continued support.

Technorati Tags: flood, flooding, Freuchie, Freuchie Mill

The flood air horn was sounded a few moments ago, the first time it has been set off, when water started to flood into Freuchie Mill at the rear of No 14 & 15 from the  “Millwaters” water channel. The cause of the flooding was blocked grates on the water feature in the garden of Freuchie Mill House and the overflow drain in the Kingdom Housing drying green.

FFAG committee members and a local resident quickly responded to rectify the blocked grates before substantial flooding occurred. Other residents responded to the flood alarm in a timely manner to deal with the protection of their own property.

The decision to sound the alarm was based on the experience of the August 2008 flood when it took less than fifteen minutes from the start of flooding from the “Millwaters” and there being more than a foot of flood water across the whole of Freuchie Mill. Within another thirty minutes a raging torrent of flood water had deluged Freuchie Mill, cars and homes had been wrecked and residents lives had been changed forever.

Technorati Tags: FFAG, Freuchie, Freuchie Mill, Millwaters

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.

Technorati Tags: FFAG, Fife, flooding, Freuchie, Freuchie Mill

The residents of Freuchie are in major flood watch preparedness.

2am Update
 

Freuchie Burn running at about 60% capacity in the centre of the village.

Water channel at The Feus running high.

Freuchie Mill culvert alarmingly high and still rising with the moderate and heavy rainfall falling on Freuchie and surrounding area.

 
Photos: Freuchie Mill culvert @ 2am

4am Update
Freuchie Mill residents are closely monitoring the water level at the culvert. Many cars have already been moved to safety and flood defence products are deployed as a precaution.

Fingers and toes are crossed for the next few hours to be relatively rain free. Flooding will occur if the next few hours sees the same rainfall as the last few hours.

 
Photos: Freuchie Mill culvert @ 4am

We would already be reporting massive property damage again on the scale of the 13th August 2008 event if it wasn’t for the reinstatement of the diversion pipe a few years ago and the surface drainage improvements scheme completed in 2009. Once again the residents of Freuchie Mill thank Cllr MacDiarmid and everyone at Fife Council for getting the drainage improvements completed before this current incident. Time to redouble of efforts before we get an event that we cannot survive!

Technorati Tags: flood, flooding, Freuchie, Freuchie Burn, Freuchie Mill, Greentree Brae, The Feus