I’m pleased to say that I heard yesterday from Paul Jennings – chair of the River Chess Association – that the Environment Agency had contacted him to say they will not go ahead with the resumption of the Alma Road abstraction: not for now anyway (see previous post).

Paul’s official statement reads: “The Environment Agency has announced that work on the resumption of abstraction at Alma Road, Chesham has been halted. Affinity Water has been asked to stop work. The Chiltern Society, River Chess Association and Chiltern Chalk Stream have been told that the EA want to engage with local stakeholders to present their evidence. The River Chess Association feels there will be little data to support the resumption of abstraction. It believes the focus should be on tangible flood risk identified by volunteers over the past 5 years not theoretical models.”

Respect to the EA for being gracious enough to listen to the public unease at their poorly explained and apparently not well justified plans, to act quickly and halt their work.

We’ll see now the real case for the proposal, but as I suggested in the previous blog post, manipulating groundwater levels to mitigate fluvial flooding is a very convoluted approach and unlikely to work, in my view. Fluvial flooding is all about channel conveyance capacity. The best way to use a chalk aquifer to mitigate flooding would be to address run-off in the upper catchment and make changes to ditches, drainage and land-management (encourage zero till, for example) so as to increase aquifer recharge rates and slow in-channel flow rates. The aquifer itself will then act as a buffer. Do that in combination with easing conveyance pinch-points in the channel, of which there will be many in a town like Chesham.

I also questioned whether repurposing a public utility groundwater abstraction licence towards so-called flood mitigation could possibly be within the conditions of the licence.

And finally I asked if deliberately increasing one form of environmental damage – abstraction – to off set another – flooding – might be in breach of water framework directive rules.

I hope all these issues are addressed when the EA engages with stakeholders.