Call for emergency volunteers after flooding

Press Eye - Northern Ireland - 31st October 2023

Photo by Jonathan Porter / Press Eye

The public are advised to avoid Newry City Centre as it is experiencing unprecedented levels of flooding due to the canal bursting its banks overnight.
A major clean-up operation is under way in the city this morning.
Flooding has hit parts of Northern Ireland and people have been warned not to travel, amid heavy rain and weather warnings.

:The public are advised to avoid Newry City Centre as it is experiencing unprecedented levels of flooding due to the canal bursting its banks overnight.
A major clean-up operation is under way in the city this morning.
Flooding has hit parts of Northern Ireland and people have been warned not to travel, amid heavy rain and weather warnings. — Press Eye - Northern Ireland - 31st October 2023 Photo by Jonathan Porter / Press Eye The public are advised to avoid Newry City Centre as it is experiencing unprecedented levels of flooding due to the canal bursting its banks overnight. A major clean-up operation is under way in the city this morning. Flooding has hit parts of Northern Ireland and people have been warned not to travel, amid heavy rain and weather warnings. :The public are advised to avoid Newry City Centre as it is experiencing unprecedented levels of flooding due to the canal bursting its banks overnight. A major clean-up operation is under way in the city this morning. Flooding has hit parts of Northern Ireland and people have been warned not to travel, amid heavy rain and weather warnings.

A drive for emergency volunteers is to be launched in the wake of an unprecedented flooding “disaster”.

Newry, Mourne and Down District Council (NMDDC) has agreed a proposal this week to bolster a “weakened” community resilience team and replicate it across all seven of its district electoral areas (DEAs).

Elected reps were previously told in chambers that the Department for Infrastructure (DfI) had “taken the lead” and given early flood warnings to such groups for a ripple effect of the message to be made throughout the community.

However, residents and businesses in Newry and Downpatrick have publicly stated they had no early contact about the recent emergency incident casting doubt on the effectiveness of current resilience groups in place.

Assistant director of community development, Alison Robb in a report to the chamber, said: “There is within Newcastle a community resilience group, with membership through the statutory agencies.

“It appears to have weakened in terms of the public membership.

“I plan go meet with the public members of that group and to ascertain what their current membership is and we might bolster that.

“We’d like to know from the people on the ground where the deficits are in terms fo communication and how we can better assist people to help their communities as the first people to respond when there is an emergency such as flooding or another type of disaster.

“We are just in the recovery of the flooding, but there are lessons to be learnt on how to improve things.

“We would hope by January to have a more effective community resilience group in the Newcastle DEA and then to replicate that across different DEAs.”

Mournes SDLP rep, Laura Devlin added: “In my year as chairperson in 2020, I set up along with DfI Rivers, a resilience group in Newcastle and that was really useful.

“It brought together people affected by floods and on top of that we got the sandbag containers and the locations for that across Newcastle.

“This is something we definitely need to revisit and to re-establish.

“The issue we have now is that a lot of the residents we had back then as volunteers are now protected by the Shimna River flood scheme, so it’s something we need to get reinvigorated again.”