Highland councillor says Cloverfield Park flooding in Inverness is 'utterly disgraceful'

Highland News & Media

A Highland councillor is 'appalled' as Inverness residents in Cloverfield Park have endured severe flooding that has ruined their homes for the past 17 years.

Transcript

00:00 think it's cost factors that have stopped Scottish Water from fixing this

00:04 because it's been 17 years people have said that this has been going on for?

00:07 Well Scottish Water only agreed to fix this properly about two years ago and

00:13 that was once they had an agreement with the original developer who agreed to

00:17 fund it. Once they had that they went in and did the work with the condition

00:25 that the original developer would pay for that. But I think what they've tried

00:29 to do now is they're trying to mitigate any any losses or any costs that they

00:33 may have. So instead of perhaps going in and fixing the whole thing they

00:38 perhaps thought that they didn't need to do the substants where in fact

00:42 evidence has shown that in fact that they do. Floods are some of the worst

00:46 that I've seen in time. The parkland beside it as a council it was so severe

00:52 that we decided to cut a diagonal trench so the water would actually go into the

00:57 diagonal trench and be diverted onto a path and then into a burn. There was

01:02 one another occasion where there was a concrete manhole cover back in 2014 in

01:08 the middle of the park that was blown off with the pressure of water and had a

01:13 child fallen into that it would have been catastrophic. And these are the kind

01:18 of things that they've been dealing with apart from the fact that it undermines

01:21 anyone's ability to try and sell a property because obviously the flood

01:25 risk is so great. And with winter on the approach you know flooding is bound to

01:30 get even worse. It must be really worrying for these residents to go

01:36 through this again and again each year. I mean who do you think should be held

01:40 responsible for this? Well it's certainly Scottish Water now. The ball is

01:46 very firmly in their court. That's why you know I will be lobbying them to come

01:52 in and fix this once and for all. I've already raised it with the teams in

01:56 Highland Council with a roads department. They've made Scottish Water aware that

02:00 the repairs that they've done have been unsuccessful. So we need a successful

02:05 repair. We simply cannot allow this to continue.

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