How a town in Yorkshire worked with nature to stay dry
One notorious Yorkshire flood blackspot was celebrating staying dry – despite having been refused a multimillion pound defence scheme.
They built 167 leaky dams of logs and branches – which let normal flows through but restrict and slow down high ones – in the becks above the town; added 187 lesser obstructions, made of bales of heather and fulfilling the same purpose, in smaller drains and gullies; and planted 29 hectares of woodland. And, after much bureaucratic tangling, they built a bund, to store up to 120,000 cubic metres of floodwater, releasing it slowly through a culvert.
