Jun 9 2006

By Francis Batt Assistant Editor Windsor Express

THE designers of the controversial Jubilee River are being sued, three-and-a-half years after the floods which devastated areas of the royal borough.

Rivers authority the Environment Agency confirmed this week that it had appointed solicitors to litigate against the company Lewin Fryer, after vast areas of Wraysbury and Datchet flooded in 2003 soon after the new river opened.

Angry flood victims blamed the river, which had been designed to protect Maidenhead, for diverting flood water onto them.

Since then several faults in the system have been identified.

This week Ewan Larcombe, Datchet parish councillor and chairman of the Community Support Group South which is part of the Thames Flood Forum, said: "As soon as someone opened the gates to disperse the flood water the whole thing fell apart from one end to the other."

But he insisted the EA must accept a fair part of the blame itself, for not questioning the design at an earlier stage.

He said: "The EA doesn't have any knowledgeable people on it with genuine experience of how rivers work.

"They are all office wallahs who press buttons and believe the world will turn out the way they want. They pay so-called experts and assume everything will be okay.

"In the old days people who ran the river wore wellies occasionally and knew how they actually worked."

Outspoken EA critic Ian Thompson, who is also on the Community Support Group South and a member of Thames Awash, was concerned that the agency was refusing this week to give any detailed information about the legal action against the designers they appointed.

He said: "My concern is that this is the first stage towards trying to settle all this privately behind closed doors. It is not acceptable.

"There was a massive overspend on this project, £10million had to be spent on alterations and it is still only operating at 84% capacity.  This is public money."

He said that people needed to be answerable for mistakes that included Datchet being left unprotected.

He said: "It took us three years of lobbying to finally get a protective wall built at Black Potts so that all our gardens aren't flooded again.

"The design ignored the existence of a gulley with the result that all the water went straight into our village in 2003.

"The list of design defects on the Jubilee River is horrendous; it should not be resolved between solicitors behind closed doors."