Westmeath County Council has been instructed to prepare emergency plans for flooding and severe cold weather, after a report this week found the overall response to the winter’s extreme weather conditions to be “inadequate”.
The report also recommends that councils develop a database of people vulnerable to the effects of floods and severe weather, and that they include a separate budget for the drainage and maintenance of rivers in its annual budgets.
The report from the Oireachtas Committee on the Environment, Heritage and Local Government, published on Tuesday, found that in general local authorities responded proactively to the challenges of the periods of heavy rainfall and freezing.
However, they found that the overall response “lacked clear direction”, and there was a “clear absence of effective co-ordination and management of the situation”.
Representatives from Westmeath, Offaly, Longford, Roscommon, and several other councils met with the committee to recount the nature and extent of the severe weather events, the actions taken, the lessons learned, and the outstanding issues.
The report’s recommendations for local authorities include that each should prepare specific flood and severe cold weather major emergency plans, including detailed risk assessments.
Each local authority should prepare an inventory of water infrastructure and set out measures that need to be taken to protect them from the risk of flooding, and should also review their effectiveness in the treatment of roads during severe cold spells.
The committee, of which Longford/Westmeath TD James Bannon and Mullingar’s Senator Camillus Glynn are members, also recommended that the Department should manage a national programme of road salt procurement and storage, and that flood warning systems be put in place on all major river systems.
Commenting on the report, Deputy James Bannon said: “The exceptional weather conditions suffered in late 2009 and early 2010 have shown that gaps exist in the system which need to be addressed. I believe that the recommendations of our report will go some way to filling this gap and help to bring about a more effective and streamlined response effort.”
