Using nature to reduce flood risk at Cam Hopton School

Published: Tuesday January 31, 2023

A group of children and adults standing under a banner saying Life in all its fullnessExpert engineers have created an innovative water management system to tackle a flooding problem at Cam Hopton Church of England Primary School.

The hillside position of the school, situated above a stream, meant that their school playing field and playground were flooding frequently during heavy rain. Children were unable to use the outdoor space and were caked in mud when they went outside.

Severn Trent has fully funded work to provide natural rain gardens and planters to mimic nature in a way that reduces the peak flooding response.

Instead of putting in extra drains and trying to move the water off the land as quickly as possible, civil engineers from Atkins have created a system of raised beds where water is captured and slowly released, sending filtered water into the local stream, helping the off-flow and also nurturing a water garden.

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Ben Wilding, Senior Civil Engineer, Atkins, who was contracted to design the scheme, said, “We need to not be fighting against nature and concreting and building wherever we want. We need to be working with nature and really harnessing nature’s power to solve the problems that effectively have been created over the past 200 years of industrialisation.”

The Revd Fiona Crocker is the parish priest and said, “God asks us to be good stewards of the world that he has created and here at Cam Hopton they are showing that they are putting that into action.”

If you think that a project like this might be beneficial at your school, contact David Williams, Principal Advisor for Buildings at the Diocese of Gloucester,  Âku.1730809141gro.c1730809141oidso1730809141lg@sm1730809141ailli1730809141wd1730809141

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