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00:00So day-to-day our role is to protect people and support people across the community in emergencies and flooding is no different.
00:07That includes obviously responding to collisions on the road network, people stuck in flood water whether that be in their vehicles
00:13or people that are being affected day-to-day by flooding and may need rescuing.
00:17It's been a really busy period for us in Northamptonshire with the Environment Agency with three times the average rain this month.
00:23So 15 centimetres of rain which has caused flooding across the county and affected a lot of communities.
00:30Just last week alone between Monday and Friday we had over 200 calls, flood related calls, of which we responded to over 80 of these
00:39and assisting other agencies with evacuations as well as being prepared to respond as and when we needed to.
00:47So we stood at Northampton Washlands which is a large flood storage reservoir we use to try and control the amount of water going downstream.
00:54It's really difficult for any river system to cope with three times the average amount of rain in a month and as a result of that we've seen the devastating flooding.
01:03A lot of the planning, certainly working with Billing Aquadrome and our local partners and Yarwell Mill is being able to support them in their evacuation
01:12but also we've had to do some rescues as well so using our staff that are trained in swift water rescue to be able to rescue people from boats or from flooded property as well.
01:22I think with Northampton we've got the challenge of the Caravan Park Billing Aquadrome which is situated on flood plain
01:30so acutely at risk of residents needing to be evacuated and looked after.
01:37We've got a regular cleaning and maintenance programme of our drains, culverts, gullies across West Northamptonshire.
01:44Around 20,000 have been inspected and cleaned since the start of the financial year so that's since April.
01:51So a huge volume of work is done to make sure that particularly the high risk drainage areas are regularly cleaned and inspected.
02:01We have hot spots where it floods, especially at Yarwell Mill down in just off the Elmdale region.
02:08We've got the Greenway, we've got Erthimbora and Highamferras and areas there which flood
02:12but there's a lot of capacity down there in the flood plains which are taking the water at the moment.
02:18For us we're suitably trained, we've got adequate resources to be able to respond
02:25so we're always planning and preparing and we're ready for whatever's coming next.
02:30So first of all I would encourage people to sign up through the government websites for the flood alerts and the flood warnings,
02:36to heed the advice that ourselves and partners give them, things like don't drive through flood water, report flooding is really important to us
02:45and know your community, who's vulnerable in your community, what can you do as a community to support and help each other
02:51which in turn helps and supports us and our critical partners.