Lucky escape from major flooding during deluge

Galway was ‘lucky’ to have escaped a major flooding event last weekend, according to the local authority.

A number of premises in Eyre Square, Flood Street, High Street and Cross Street suffered water damage from spot flooding, and there were some minor roads closures, including in Salthill, but Galway City Council said it could have been a lot worse.

“More than two inches of rain fell in Galway between Sunday morning and Tuesday afternoon – that’s a lot of rain,” a spokesperson said.

“There was a high tide, as well, up to Tuesday and so we were lucky to an extent, that there weren’t high winds and that there wasn’t any overlapping of water (from the docks or mouth of the Corrib at Spanish parade) like what happened during Storm Eleanor.

“In a sense we were lucky, but these sorts of extreme weather events have become more and more frequent in the last 10 to 15 years. How do we cope with it? How do we deal with it? What does our roads and drainage crews do, going forward? We are working on a solution with Minister Kevin ‘Boxer’ Moran, about long-term flood defences (at Spanish Arch), but that’s in the early stages of planning. We are currently inviting submissions to our draft Climate Adaptation Strategy, and these are the questions we’ll be dealing with,” he said.

The Council said it had taken measures to prevent flooding, but such was the deluge of rain last weekend, that the system couldn’t cope.

“Our roads crew and drainage guys had anticipated it, to a certain extent, because the weather forecast was for heavy rain, and the gullies had been jettisoned in advance but with that amount of rain, the sheer volume of water that fell, in heavy showers, it was monsoon like conditions, you just couldn’t allow for it,” he said.

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.

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