THE economic heart of Letterkenny could be destroyed if the town ever experienced the type of devastating floods that struck in parts of England in the last few weeks, it has been claimed this week.
Councillor Gerry McMonagle was speaking at Monday night's Town Council meeting where he called for urgent steps to be taken to upgrade the storm drain infrastructure around the town. Cllr McMonagle warned the new town centre on Neil T. Blaney road would be seriously affected and parts of the Town Council offices could even be under seven foot of water if floods hit the town.
"The new town centre is the economic heart of the town and God forbid, if we had a flood, there would be irreparable damage," he said.
Cllr McMonagle tabled a motion calling on the members to discuss the "very real" threat of future flooding to vast areas of the town.
He made particular reference to the parts of the town that were historically the flood plains, but have now been recently developed.
EMERGENCY SERVICES
Cllr McMonagle said he has discussed the issue with members of the emergency services and the Office of Public Works and while accepting that Donegal County Council does have an emergency plan in place, he described it as 'nice flowery writing'.
"But where do you put the water. Have we got boats and what do you do for evacuating people?," he said.
Meanwhile, Cllr Damien Blake said unreasonably high rainfall over the past few months had already caused flooding problems in some of the older estates in Letterkenny. He said the council should investigate the use of modern storm water attenuation systems. This would see flood water held underground for a short time and then slowly released back into the river.
"There are new estates and new developments which have to deal with the run-off of water from tarmac," he said.
"We saw it recently in Raphoe where one freak shower practically destroyed the town. I'm not talking about digging up all the roads and footpaths but if we can run a pipe into a large tank to take the overflow, we would have a much better opportunity to address the flooding. It's a substantial problem and we need a substantial solution," Cllr Blake said.
The two motions received widespread support from the members although Cllr Dessie Larkin said the situation wasn't helped by the fact that so much storm water was getting into the town's sewerage network.
