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.
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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.