Council blames Hove flood on sheer volume of rain

Completely agree with the above comment – and to think that we muppets of taxpayers actually get our hard-earned money wasted by paying too many salaries to an over-staffed Town Hall Propaganda Team (aka our benighted council’s Communications Team) to put out such arrant codswallop!

So let’s get rational:

Obviously locals can remember a time when an adequately designed and maintained drainage system kept the road sufficiently clear of water during and after the heaviest rains, so why not now?

If this was, for example, a supermarket car-park the first thing the likes of Asda or Sainsbury’s would do is to call-in their retained drainage clearance firm (such as Dyno Rod etc) to clear whatever’s causing a blockage which hadn’t been there previously, surely?

And if these experts reported back that there seemed to be some sort of an obstruction which couldn’t be fully cleared the next step would be to commission a CCTV survey, looking for something such as a partially collapsed drain.

In that case there’s now some very clever technology to fix such a defect, usually without excavations being needed!

However if, big “if” in a mature built-up area such as Hangleton, something has happened to increase the flow of heavy rain on to Poplar Avenue beyond the original (adequate) design calculations then Council officers have, and had, a clear Duty of Care to re-calculate and to implement whatever upgrade is needed to cope?

And in the deeply unlikely case of Southern Water’s main drain becoming overloaded (very occasionally it might just, but within a few hours of the rain stopping all would be back to normal – given the gigantic collector tunnel built along the City’s seafront over 25 years ago, and appearing to work well since then?).

As taxpayers we need to ask: In our so-called democratic committee system how come our 54 elected councillors allow the paid staff to firstly behave in such an incompetent way, and then to publish such arrant nonsense, in a pathetic attempt to both conceal the true facts of the matter, and to put the blame on Southern Water (already in the doghouse for their own failings elsewhere, but almost certainly not here in Poplar Avenue?).

Also, given the Tory hegemony over many years in Hangleton, and the rivers of taxpayers money poured into the Hangleton and Knoll Community Project over many years, why does the community and it’s Councillors appear to be doing so little to protect the good functioning of the area’s infrastructure?

Prior to the boroughs merging in in 1997 the very well-run Hove Borough Council took gully-emptying very seriously, with a regular cycle of the gully-sucker tanker cleaning every street drain in the borough! So drain blockages were very rare, but generally down to clandestine disposal of builders rubble in the gully pit (and quickly cleared by HBC once notified!).

But since those halcyon days of a well-run Hove municipality our City council has really neglected this basic duty of gully emptying – to such an extent that complaints of blocked street drain gullies pour in from all across our City, with no service improvement in sight!

And in this context of council neglect what should our Councillors have been doing to promote the best interests of their communities?

Firstly to publish online an indexed list of all street drains in the ward, to assist citizens to report specific issues with a given street drain. With the Councillors then adding to such notifications whatever action council officers have promised, and the target date for completion?

And secondly to get a friendly metal-worker to make up some gully test-rods, the main feature being an L-shape foot to the rod (possibly sold online?).

So firstly the rod is lowered through the street grating, to feel for the depth of silt. And then the rod gets turned through 90 degrees, for its foot to enter the drain-pipe opening to check for any degree of silting in that pipe (there should be none).

Since most gullies are installed on a through sewer there’ll be a second pipe, inlet or outlet, which will also need to be tested in a similar way.

Ideally the Councillors will organise community teams to test their own street drains, after the Autumn leaf-fall so probably in each November?

Hopefully the public-spirited nature of looking after one’s own community, and being given a structure + probe-rods to do so, will also help to detect blockages caused by the illicit dumping of rubble in our street drains?

And on a financial note; just how long before Southern Water sends us a bill for millions, for the costs incurred by them due to our council letting too much silt flow into Southern’s sewers from our gullies, which are supposed to trap all silt and leaves etc, but can only do so when regularly and adequately emptied and cleaned by our City council (which apparently ended our own in- house gully team many years ago)?

Come on, Councillors – there’s useful work for you to get to grips with here – rather than wasting your time and our money on fatuous vanity projects (such as the soon to be started destruction of Western Road, Brighton – already by far the best shopping street in our City, since it’s super successful re-vamp some 20 years ago. The only real problem is the proliferation of takeaway food delivery scooters, for which we need to introduce licensing with a GPS digital system to issue automatic penalties (£150?) for exceeding 20mph and/or for going the wrong way in one-way streets etc. The other recent problem in Western Rd is the unlawful riding of near-silent e-scooters, possibly best tackled by paying our various enforcement officers to be inducted as Special Constables, with powers of arrest, plus professional Go-Pro type cameras to film those refusing to stop, to hand-in their scooter for destruction. Obviously neither of these recent problems justify the waste of millions of our taxes on messing around with one of the best streets in our City, on which millions have been spent over the years, do they?).

Time for some common-sense, surely?

Nothing to do with the new builds at the top putting extra stress in the already overloaded system that is in place yet the council still allow development in areas and say there will be no problem with waste water or anything else As usual infastructure is simply ignore

What complete b*ll*cks from the council.
If the blockage isn’t in the road where the flood is then it’s simply further downstream in the same drainage system..
How dumb can these clipboard officials be?
Any plumber or drains expert will know the truth here.