Recent severe weather events have exposed inadequacies with highway drainage systems following the impact of flooding to homes, businesses and highways under the glare of national press interest.  There was therefore considerable interest, and a full room in attendance, at the CIHT seminar on HMEP Guidance on the Management of Highway Drainage Assets, this week.

The seminar was based around a number of case studies - examples of ‘good practice’ from within the sector.  Matthew Lugg, HMEP advocate welcomed and provided an overview on HMEP and the reasons why guidance had been developed on how to manage drainage assets.  There was then a presentation from Will Rogers, Technical Director, Transportation Water Services – URS who provided an overview of the guidance and the recommendations in the document.  This was followed by Peter Wells, Highway Asset Management Lead, Nottingham City Council who gave a talk on the selection of survey equipment outlining how helpful GIS positioning and hand held devices were in managing drainage assets. 

Michael Whitehead, Head of Drainage & Water Environment from the Highways Agency then presented on Targeting Flood Hotspots on the Strategic Road Network.  This was balanced against a local roads perspective in the next presentation from Andy Stevenson, Infrastructure Asset Manager - Cornwall Council on the Effective Use of Limited Budgets.  Andy outlined the benefits of taking a risk based approach to the management of drainage assets.   The final presentation was from Andrew Savage, Contract and Policy Manager  at Warwickshire County Highways, Multi-Agency who outlined how a Partnering Approach to the Management of Flooding in Warwickshire since 2007 had helped to manage an area prone to flood events.
 

For information on HMEP please see:  http://www.dft.gov.uk/hmep/index.php