How to write and use a community flood plan

Writing the plan is PREPARE work in the preparedness cycle. Using it is ADAPT: the river rises past a line you drew in advance, and the prepared alternative goes into effect without a debate. The summer 2007 floods showed the price of doing this badly. The Pitt Review recorded 55,000 properties flooded, around 7,000 people rescued and 13 deaths.

In England you do not start from a blank page. The Environment Agency publishes a community flood plan template with checklists for people who support a community or group. Local councils and the Local Resilience Forum hold the wider multi-agency flood plan; yours sits underneath it, so share it with them and ask what they will expect from you.

Check whether your stretch has a Flood Warning service at all. If it does not, Environment Agency advice is to build your own trigger: use local knowledge of how fast the river responds, tie the trigger to a rising level approaching bank full, set it lower on a fast river, and fit a depth marker or use a bridge pier as a reference. River levels for many stations are on the GOV.UK Check for flooding service.

A worked example shows the arithmetic. Say past floods reached the first doorstep on Mill Lane at 2.60 m on the bridge marker, the river rose about 15 cm an hour last time, and your team needs three hours to clear the lane. Your action level is then 2.15 m at the latest. Set it at 2.00 m to leave margin for a night call-out, and write the number into the plan. These figures are invented; measure yours, and revise them after every flood.

Mark on a paper map the streets that flood first and the route that stays dry longest. Agree the rest place with the council, and a second one in case the first is cut off. Then walk each route at the action level: a road that looks fine on a map may have a dip that fills early. Any warden who goes out needs a way back, and Environment Agency guidance is firm that volunteers must not put their own lives at risk.

The Pitt Review found no significant evidence that sandbags protected individual households in 2007. It accepted that they remain a focus for community action, and recommended moving general provision towards better products such as kitemarked flood boards and air brick covers. Your plan should say honestly what sandbags are for, usually protecting a low gap or diverting a shallow flow, and name who fills and delivers them.

Pumps need more thought than people expect. List for each one its owner, location, fuel, hose length, who may run it, and where the water goes. Pumping into a drain that is already full moves the problem to a neighbour. Keep contact details for contractors and agree call-off terms before the season.

The Environment Agency’s flood plan pack asks for a list of vulnerable people and locations. Pitt recorded particular problems for vulnerable groups when mains water failed in 2007. Keep the list small and specific: who needs help to move, who relies on powered equipment, who has no phone, which care home has a ground floor at risk, and who checks each one. It is personal data, so agree with your council where it is held, who sees it, and how often it is refreshed.

Recovery starts while the water is still high. Keep a timed log of levels and decisions, photograph high-water marks with a location, and record each flooded property with the date, depth and route the water took. Those records help with insurance and repairs, and they feed the investigation a lead local flood authority may carry out under section 19 of the Flood and Water Management Act 2010.

Then comes the LEARN stage. Ask what the gauge read when the first door flooded, and move your trigger if it was late. Our guide to running a debrief covers the meeting, and a SITREP format keeps the log readable.

In Sinkaos, a flood plan can hold plan A, B and C with decision points tied to gauge values, so a sensor threshold raises an alert and the prepared option is ready to switch to. Official warnings appear as a context source, wardens’ reports work offline, and the debrief is built from the record. A person still decides. See Sinkaos for council emergency teams.