[Mike Potter:] Because it's quite a big tourist town
you get a lot of people who are put off from coming
as soon as they hear that there are floods.
There had been proposals for building walls
which had eventually got thrown out
on the cost-benefit analysis that the Environment Agency carry out,
where they said, "there's nothing we can do for you...
unless somebody comes up with some good ideas."
And in the Civic Society, we were saying, "what could we do?"
And somebody had come up with this idea of an upstream bund,
where you hold the water temporarily upstream
behind a small dam.
The problem is: how do you get people to listen to you,
when you're just Mr Nobody from Pickering?
But then along came the universities, who said:
"would you like to work with us on a study?"
You end up with a report
and then you've got that credibility that the backing needs
-- if you mention 'Oxford University', people tend to prick up their ears.
[Sarah Whatmore:] We put together a project
which had a number of fairly standard dimensions
about trying to improve the way in which we model flood risk
and manage flood risk.
But the experimental dimension
was to work with communities actually affected by flooding in the UK
and to get their local knowledge and perspectives
integrated into the modelling process.
Having invented this method of doing it,
we had to try it out
and Pickering was our first attempt.
With hindsight, it's a very successful project
but at the time
we didn't know it was going to be successful.
We were trying it out in that sense of experiment too.
When we first actually went to Pickering,
we were feeling quite nervous about it because
we turned up the week after these unseasonal summer floods.
We might have looked like vultures,
in which case we thought, "crikey, we might not get a very good response."
Or, it would raise the issue again in people's minds
and there would be an enthusiasm for people to volunteer.
It turned out to be the latter, so we were very fortunate in that regard.
It's an excellent way of working,
where the flood management authorities
no longer have the confidence of the local population.
[Mike Potter:] Once we'd finished the project
and were trying to get it further,
I'm just poking and prodding at various agencies, MPs, local councillors and so on
but at the end of it,
we've got a flood scheme.
As it happened, DEFRA had a pot of money
and they were looking for a number of projects, in a similar way to this,
as pilot projects,
and we ended up winning the bid
for one of three of those.
We're now in 2014
and it's just coming to fruition.
Under normal conditions,
you've got a culvert going through this big concrete structure
which will be underground.
The water all runs through the culvert,
carries on through Pickering, no problem.
Then you get the heavy rainfall events;
when it gets to the point where
the amount of water in the Pickering Beck can no longer get through that culvert;
the water will start to back up,
it fills the floodplain,
what it provides is 90% of the amount of water storage needed
in case of a 1 in 25 flood.
You come back here in a year's time
and you'll be astounded at the difference as it greens over,
the trees start to regenerate
and they'll be replanted.
They were always speaking at our level
they weren't trying to do this highbrow rubbish or 'we're clever and they're not'.
[[Sarah Whatmore:] So we produced a large number of papers
but they pale into insignificance
in comparison with actually making a difference
to flood risk management.