County Council gets €6m to repair flood destruction

Galway County Council has received €6m out of the €8.5m it applied for from the Department of the Environment to address the damage caused by the widespread flooding.

The local authority expects a second, smaller allocation to be granted later in the year.

Senior Executive Engineer John Leahy said the “very substantial” severe weather allocation would be divided out between Ballinasloe and Loughrea, with the latter to get €1.7m, mainly to improve the roads destroyed by the water.

The Council received €1.5m to immediately cleanup the county once the water receeded while the €6m will be used to address the long term damage to non-national roads.

A further application has been made to Transport Infrastructure Ireland (TII) – formerly the NRA – to repair the national roads but so far no indication has been received on that funding.

“We have to look at the costings. We have to finalise the schedule of works and we’ll talk to you about what’s going to be done before the work starts on the ground,” said Mr Leahy at this month’s Loughrea Municipal District meeting.

Councillor Joe Byrne asked how the council would manage to get the work done when it was already under pressure to complete the regular road works programme due to staff and budget cuts.

“I have a concern about how we can delivery in the Loughrea area €1.7m worth of work on top of the regular roads programme. What’s our strategy to actually delivering it?”

Cllr Michael Fahy said there was still severe flooding on roads near his Ardrahan home, with four feet of water still covering a road for 600 yards forcing residents on a detour of eight miles.

He said an obvious solution was to raise the road higher than an adjacent lough and erect crash barriers on the lake side to prevent accidents.

“It’s three months of hardship for the people. Only tractors, jeeps and lorries are going through it. It happened in 2014, five years ago and this winter. The school is half a mile from the flood but school buses have to make long detours,” he exclaimed.

Mr Leahy said there were numerous locations in the same situation throughout the county.

“I’d be very, very careful about raising a road beside a lake, there are a lot of safety issues. We don’t have the resources to produce 150 reports about each location. We don’t’ want to create a bigger problem.”

Cllr Byrne said there was still 200 acres of land still under water at Cahermore, with some of the floods eight feet deep.  There should be an urgency to progress the minor flood works as soon as possible.

“Seven families still haven’t returned home as their septic tanks flooded…the Cahermore channel which got so much attention is now dry, it’s at a level that can’t take the water. We need another channel to go at the level of water. We are still in emergency mode in relation to flooding.”