Alde & Ore Estuary Partnership

A partnership set up by the community for the community to protect homes, businesses

and our environment from flooding

What is The Alde & Ore Estuary Partnership (AOEP)?

• 2012 – AOEP formed to create a flood plan for the Alde & Ore Estuary

• AOEP has representatives from parishes, landowners, farmers, river users, environment experts and businesses

• support and advice given to AOEP by statutory and local government bodies

The AOEP plan…

• recognises value of estuary to local economy, and value of its environmental features

• focusses on resilience and slow adaptive management through improvement of current flood defences

• looks at estuary as a whole; covering 14 flood cells and 18 parishes

• will be assessed regularly against sea-level rise and habitat change

• will be used to support planning and funding applications

The AOEP plan aims to protect

• a thriving and growing visitor economy• hundreds of houses, mostly in Aldeburgh, Orford and

Snape, but scattered throughout• businesses in and around floodplain – shops,

commercial buildings, farms• infrastructure – roads, water supplies, sewerage

works, electricity supplies• 7,000 acres of farmland and grazing marsh• miles of walking along estuary banks• sailing, sailing clubs and moorings

Resilience

• over the next 20-50 years, the estuary facesa greater risk of flooding from badly maintainedwalls than it does from rising sea levels

• the AOEP plan therefore takes a resilience approach

• resilience accepts overtopping will occur in surge events, but avoids catastrophic damage (such as in the 1953 flood) up to a 1:200 event occurring in 2050

What is resilience?

• walls will be upgraded from their current height (2.4m –2.9m) to approx. 3.3m overall

• higher walls would be overtopped less often and be much less likely to breach, up to a 1-in-200-year (1:200) event

• walls will be upgraded according to greatest need and ‘Benefit–Cost Ratio’ (BCR) – cost and sustainability of repair weighed against value of property/infrastructure

Building up walls makes overtopping less likely. Walls can be made wider on the land side, making them more resilient to breaching.

Saltmarsh is often the first line of defence. It protects sea walls and absorbs wave

energy. Pilot projects to protect saltmarsh are part of the resilience approach.

Benefits of resilience approach

• resilience – most cost-effective of options reviewed by AOEP

• overtopping – flood water can be pumped / drained out quickly. Damage to agricultural land is minimised and although impacts of flooding could be longer lasting for property, full recovery is still possible

• breaches – damage to property and land is greater and more costly to resolve. With breaches, flood water rises quickly and cannot be removed until breaches are mended

In short, the AOEP plan allows for some overtopping in the worst tidal surges but avoids breaches, which cause

much more damage and are much more difficult to resolve.

If we have a 1:200 surge in 2050, the plan aims for this level of protection and outcome, ie some overtopping…

avoiding this…

Breaches in walls are difficult and costly to repair; and may not be feasible.

The consequences of flooding…

• flooded infrastructure such as roads can be an inconvenience to individuals, but have serious implications for local businesses, reducing custom and revenue in all sectors

• flooding can impact tourism – reducing the desirability of an area as a destination for visitors, and affecting recreational access for walkers, birdwatching and sailing…

Why should parishes get involved?

• while flooding may affect limited property and land directly, the knock-on effects can involve the whole community

• flooding affects individuals and businesses over a wide area, not just the area directly impacted

• the benefits of communities working together are also far-reaching

• pooling our resources gives us a stronger voice when decisions are being made that affect us all

Who pays?

• current Government funding policy protects housing and lives, and some fragile habitats

• in practice, urban rather than rural areas are more likely to benefit (although following the December 2013 surge, limited additional funding may be available)

• upgrading of estuary walls is likely to cost £7–10M of which only £2–3M is likely to be met by Government

Raising the funds

• the plan aims to raise some of the shortfallthrough ‘Enabling Development’

• this is where landowners donate land for sale to developers and exceptional planning permission is granted

• the money raised is donated for the benefit of the estuary defences as a whole

• Suffolk Coastal District Council have strict criteria to safeguard local interests in these cases

• using a pessimistic estimate of house plot values, this could mean 5–8 new houses per parish

Your views matter

• we think this is a good plan, but we needyour feedback on it – the plan cannot befinalised without it

Get involved

• find out more about the plan at www.aoep.co.uk• public consultation

1. visit one of our final community drop-in session3 December Orford Town Hall, Orford 2 pm –

7 pm

2. email us at aoepconsultation@gmail.com3. take part in our online consultation

• consultation ends 17 December 2015 the AOEP Estuary plan will be finalised in early 2016