Newark and Sherwood residents asked to play their part in ensuring Nottinghamshire's drainage network keeps working

Residents have been asked to play their part in ensuring a vital part of Nottinghamshire’s drainage network keeps working.

Via East Midlands and subcontractors ACL are responsible for cleaning the county’s network of 147,000 gullies.

In 2019-20, ACL tried to clean all the gullies, but parked vehicles and gully defects meant that 4% could not be cleaned.

Gullies collect surface water from the highway and direct it towards watercourses. During exceptionally heavy rainfall and storms, there is a common misconception that gullies becoming overwhelmed means that the system has failed.

But if there is so much water attempting to travel along highway drains that it exceeds the pipework’s capacity to carry it, a build-up of pressure can cause water to find a point of escape, sometimes through gullies or manholes.

The county council, alongside Via East Midlands, is looking at buying telemetry and CCTV equipment to allow drainage assets to be monitored remotely.

Risk management authorities including the county council, the Environment Agency and district and borough councils, would then be able to monitor the condition of drainage assets during storms.

Committee vice-chairman Phil Rostance said: “Our highways drainage systems are key to ensuring water flows off the highways and into watercourses.

“Maintaining these systems is particularly important to ensure they can work to their full capacity during flooding and storm events, which Nottinghamshire has seen a number of over the last 12 months.

“We would like to ask residents to play their part in ensuring that our teams can access gullies when needed.”