After battling flooding for decades, Carlow town finds itself under water yet again. Why have long-promised drainage works failed to materialise?, asks Kathy Sheridan
EVERYONE IN Carlow town has a flooding story. The Big One, against which all inundations are measured, crashed in on St Patrick's Day, 1947, a combination of snow melt and heavy rain. Pat Jones was only five at the time, but he remembers his father carrying two siblings down the stairs of his home in Paupish Lane, with the water almost up to his chest.
The point is that while this week's media invasion might suggest otherwise, major floods are nothing new to Carlow. Sixty years of press and official reports tell a miserable story of marooned families, sandbags, temporary gangways and general hardship. In 1954, the Army weighed in to evacuate 40 marooned families. In 1960, Ballymanus Terrace was flooded to a depth of four feet. In 1968 , more than 50 families woke up on Christmas morning to flooded homes. Over Christmas 1969, the town was under two feet of water in places.
And still, the River Barrow was capable of surprising officials.
In 1990, when Carlow was said to have suffered the worst flooding since 1947, the town engineer, Leo Whelan, commented that "the speed at which the river had risen had taken everyone completely by surprise". But that was before the floods of January 1995, when rainfall was 149 per cent of normal. The 1995 deluge was later adjudged to be the worst since 1947, shunting the floods of February 1990 and June 1993 back to third and fourth in the severity league. Then there was the "minor flood" in 1996 or the bank-holiday inundation of November 2000, when flood levels again caused some surprise, reaching "a metre higher than anticipated", according to an official report, and closing Centaur and Kennedy streets to traffic for three days.
In short, whatever its source, whatever the season, when there is an excess of water, Carlow tends to be in or around centre stage.
As recently as mid-January this year, residents of apartment blocks on Centaur Street were trapped and businesses such as Dicey Reilly's pub on the Quay flooded. The only way in or out was on a boat or the back of a tractor and trailer, a scenario replicated last weekend when 102 people were evacuated from Centaur Court, a four-storey apartment block, after water reached five feet in places and the plank-walks and sandbags made yet another appearance.
Accommodation was offered to all 102 evacuees, says Joe Watters, the town clerk, although only 13 took it up: "Of the 13, nine were Irish and four Polish . . . There is a significant occupancy of east Europeans in those apartments and they obviously clicked into their network immediately. It speaks a lot for those communities and how they mind each other."
It was stressed that the vast majority of apartments were evacuated because the ESB disconnected the electricity for safety reasons.
The problem for most people was access. The Grill and Grape, a gleaming new steakhouse with scenic views over the Barrow and the pretty town park, was surrounded by water on Sunday and lost around €7,000-8000 worth of business, although the building itself remained untouched.
Most apartment residents were able to return on Tuesday or Wednesday when power was restored. However, for the landlords and tenants of the three street-level apartments in Centaur Court, it looked like the end of the line. Even to an untutored eye, the apartments, with their desirable riverside location and proximity to the park and playground, look significantly lower than the river. A young mother and her eight-month-old baby had fled, leaving behind a neatly kept home and an array of toys abandoned on squishy, contaminated carpets.
Her landlord, a north Kildare man, paces up and down surveying the damage, bristling with frustration. Having paid €141,000 for the apartment four years ago - and, at one stage, having had an offer of €206,000 withdrawn - he is now asking €170,000, none too optimistically. "This is the second time this year . . . I'd say it'll cost €60,000-70,000 to put right. You couldn't give it away now and I have a tenant who won't come back and who could blame her?," he says, eyeing the two internal concrete steps, which were intended to raise the ground floor above historic flood levels when planning permission was granted in 2002. "This was a Section 23 development in a fairly tough, derelict area. But I was told nothing about floods . . . I'm going to look at the planning application and talk to a senior counsel. It looks to me like there should have been four steps there, not two."
THE 30-SOMETHING landlord next door, a Dubliner, is equally incredulous. His three tenants have also fled and he has been putting them up at a cost of €180 a night since Sunday. The apartment had been flooded several times but this, he says, was the worst, with raw sewage seeping under the floors. "The river is gone five feet over my front door. Even if I were to put in floodgates, the water would be half way up the windows." A request to the council to put in a flood door evoked a frosty response. Although he got an insurance payment to cover the January damage, he regrets that he failed to engage a loss adjustor. "What I'm hearing now is the possibility of hidden damage - rotting of plasterboards, of floor boards, water seeping beyond the concrete floor, all the partition walls having to come up." He put the apartment on the market in January, hoping to recoup at least the €185,000 he paid for it in 2003. "There hasn't been a single enquiry, not one. They're worth nothing now. No one could get a mortgage on it. I'd never be able to rent it again because I'm not going to be able to get insurance on it. I just don't know what to do. I'm obviously going to have to pay the mortgage. It seems now that everybody in the area knew these apartments were going to be flooded . . . I got onto a solicitor and it seems the only chance now is for people to make a claim against the council."
According to Joe Watters, the town clerk, the builder's self-declared plan for the finished floor level was 46.5 metres OD (ordnance data, a system used to measure height above sea level), slightly below the historic 1947 high of 47.4m OD. "Permission was given on the basis of the plans submitted," he says. In a 1996 consultants' report, however, the flood data for Centaur Street suggests that the levels never dropped below 49.23m OD. The explanation given for the deficiency is that in the meantime, engineers changed the baseline for OD information from the Poolbeg standard to Malin Head.
On Thursday, council technicians visited the apartments and verified that the floor levels had been built to plan, absolving the builder of any potential blame. In time, Watters plans to conduct a full technical assessment of what has happened and why.
On a tour of the affected area, with water still burbling up in unexpected places and a possible problem with a pump, Watters's pride in Carlow's progress is closely tied to a defence of its current and future built developments. The suggestion that this is a flood plain and not suitable for development strikes him as nonsense.
"This area represents a prime residential and hopefully supplemental commercial and business location. This is the river Barrow, the second largest river in Ireland, in Carlow town; it is also the confluence of the Barrow and the Burrin. To suggest that this is a flood plain is like saying that the GPO is part of the flood plain of the Liffey. Without the Liffey walls, the river would flood O'Connell Street. This is the town centre."
The pumping system, he says, "ensures that the River Barrow doesn't flood in typical Irish conditions. The current flooding is the result of extraordinary conditions; 450 per cent of normal rainfall in Carlow in August fell in a single day."
He points out that the new apartment blocks up from Centaur Street to the Town Hall "are all built in accordance with the planning permission we issued. The floor level on the ground floor is higher than the 100-year flood level. The new apartments did not flood. The old ones were built at a lower ground level."
And that, for many, is the point. In an area notoriously prone to flooding, why continue to build in the absence of improvement works? "Of course it would have been better if the works had been done 20 years ago . . . Since the mid-1990s, we knew this was something that needed to be addressed," says Watters. As far back as 1996, there was a design in place for a surface drainage scheme, says Kieran Cullinane, the town engineer. "In the late 1990s, it was 'imminent'. It was removed from the National Development Plan because it was no longer just an 'aspiration'. Where it went after that, I don't know," he says.
After the 2000 floods, the heaviest since 1995 despite remedial works carried out in 1999, a representative of then environment minister Noel Dempsey was in contact with county council officials for an update on the extent of flooding and damage. A scheme announced in 2001 by the OPW was later abandoned.
So what happened? "I'd say Clonmel and Kilkenny," says a stoical Watters. "It was a question of where you were in the pecking order. I suppose it was a question of the department prioritising resources, having regard to what was occurring at the time. I'm not blaming anyone. A friend of mine was town clerk in Clonmel and that was grievous."
The good news is that the new scheme - or three schemes wrapped into one - is on the way. The main drainage scheme, surface-water-drainage scheme and the flood-relief scheme have been packaged, funded and simply await the choice of a competent contractor. Tenders have been received and a legal hitch is being ironed out. "It will take two months for the consultants to report back [on the hitch] and the scheme could take two years after that. The plan is in place."
In one sense, the attention of the media this week may prove to be the catalyst in its finalisation. The arrival of Minister for the Environment John Gormley on the scene may finally have given Carlow its time in the limelight. "I am really hugely confident after the Minister's visit that Carlow will be prioritised, expedited, funded and completed," says Watters meaningfully.