Types of Flooding

There are actually several different types of flooding which can impact your home and this is why it’s important to ensure you have sufficiently assessed the potential risk to your property by looking at UK flood risk in a wider perspective. Our Flood Report offers assessment based on a variety of flood data sets to ensure you have the most comprehensive flood risk reports available

The information below describes the key flood risk advice in greater detail.

Surface Water Flooding

This type of flooding is caused because the volume of water falling or flowing onto the metalled surface overwhelms existing drainage systems. These types of flooding risk are usually short lived and associated with heavy downpours of rain, thunder storms etc. Often there is limited advance notice of this type of localised flooding. However weather forecasts from the Met Office can give a good generalised indications of the flood risk.

Highway drainage systems are designed to deal with certain frequencies of storm and rainfall intensity. Flooding can be casued by the sheer volume of water or indicate a blockage or maintenance problem with the system. Any flooding should be reported so that the flooding can be dealt with and the system checked for adequacy.

Coastal and Fluvial Flooding

This type of flooding is caused by high tides and or inclement weather breaching sea defences and inundating the surrounding areas. River floods as banks burst and flooding of roads usually follows extended periods of exceptionally heavy rainfall.

Both of these events are usually well predicted in advance and refer to the Environment Agency and Met Office web sites for flood risk indications.

Engineering solutions that can be put in place to mitigate the impact of this type of flooding are limited simply because of the huge volumes of water involved and because it is not contained or channeled. Groundwater flooding, however can be predicted well in advance by the Environment Agency who monitor the aquifer levels throughout the year.

Groundwater Flooding

This is the most problematic type of flooding in many areas. It is different from surface water flooding caused directly by very high levels of rainfall. Where the geology of an area is predominantly chalk (which contains layers of water-bearing rock, clay or sand) layers are called aquifers. There is a natural cycle in which the aquifers are filled with rain water in the winter and discharged into chalk streams.

When the aquifers are filled to overflowing in the winter, natural springs and winterbournes are activated (winterbournes are streams or rivers that are dry in the summer months). Exceptional periods of rain can cause groundwater flooding from springs and winterbournes whic inundate roads and overwhelm drainage systems. This type of flooding can last for weeks or months. An early indication of goundwater flooding is often when property cellars start to fill with water.

Engineering solutions that can be put in place to mitigate the impact of this type of flooding are limited simply because of the huge volumes of water involved and because it is not contained or channeled.

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Information from Homecheck Professional – A Landmark Service