York flood defences put to test in wettest winter for more than 150 years
The Environment Agency say it's been "very challenging"
New data shows it's been the wettest winter in Yorkshire for more than 150 years.
On average enough water flowed through York each month to fill 150,000 Olympic sized swimming pools.
Mark Fuller is a flood advisor with the Environment Agency - he's pleased with how defences have coped throughout an "incredibly challenging" period: "The river level has hardly had chance to get back to it's normal level in between that and the next storm coming along. It's just been the relentlessness of it, storm after storm after storm."
"Everything has worked properly for the first time, and everything has worked as well as we could have hoped. There has been a couple of fine tuning points here and there which we knew would be the case but the Foss Barrier has worked like it should have done, all the gates have been closed. That's testament really to the way they were designed and built."
How bad has the weather been?
In the winter of 2023/24 the City of York faced a unique sustained challenge in defending itself against a series of winter storms.
• In York, between October and February the water that flowed through the city weighed over 2000 million tons – to be precise that was 2,033,000,000 cubic metres of water.
• To put it another way that’s an average of 150,000 Olympic swimming pools passing through the city every winter month.
• Or, over the five months, the same as the entire contents of the Kielder Reservoir which holds 200 billion litres of water.
Rainfall across Yorkshire, and in the Ouse has been exceptionally high for much of the last year. There were 10 named storms over the period from September to January.
• For Yorkshire as a whole, it has been the wettest 5 months to March since 1872. And the wettest July to December since records began.
• For the Ouse catchment that drains through York, it was also the wettest 5 months to March since 1872.