Mike wrote:

It had occurred to me before actually. The property developer was
brought to task by other residents over several issues, including
flooding. Basically they built the entire site on a known ancient
floodplain, and within the first year nearly every house was under 3ft
of water. They then "diverted the source upstream", but still the
flooding came. Eventually the council took drastic action to dam the
source, and we haven't seen any flooding since.

Everyone round here is aware that the developers are a bunch of cowboys.
The state of our 'new' houses when we moved into them was pitiful, so it
didn't really surprise me to discover we were sitting on top of a clay
pit. I was angry, but not surprised.


and you blame all of this on the builders?

Who gave them Planning Permission?

Well there's obviously several people to blame; the council for granting
the planning permission; the developers for going ahead despite knowing
that the area was a floodplain; and the residents for not voicing their
concerns loudly enough.

We weren't here when the development kicked off, and didn't know anyone
in the area. Also, because it was a new property (and for various
reasons we were in a hurry), we made the fatal mistake of not hiring a
surveyor; we took our solicitors word, and that of the developer, that
the property was sound. It was a bit of a rush job, due to us losing our
deposit on another property from the same developer (which was later
honoured anyway, at their discretion, on the new property), and failing
to sell our old house in time for the purchase of the new one. In
retrospect, we should have got a bridging loan and taken more time, but
it's easy to say that now.

To give you an idea of how dodgy this whole affair is: about a year
after moving in we got talking to the local butcher, who said that the
developers had come calling one day to ask about the area (a sort of
questionnaire). The butcher replied that the area was a floodplain, and
had been for centuries. The developer replied, and I quote our butcher,
"Oh, we don't want to hear that", and apparently he wasn't smiling when
he said it.

I think you'll find that the developers made some kind of false
assurances to the council WRT dealing with the flood problem. That would
also have allayed any objections raised by the public.

Maybe they really did intend to deal with the flooding, but like
everything else these developers do, didn't pull their thumbs out and do
it quickly enough (they are still building further up the street - 5
years behind schedule).

Here's another example: the bridge over the river which divides us from
the rest of the world, was grossly inadequate, and became impassable
during the flooding. Essentially it was just a dip in the road, made of
solid concrete and had a small drainage pipe shoved through it. Two
years, and two major floods later, it was still there. It took court
action to force them to replace it with a real bridge, which they have
finally done.

Anyway, I'm sure the council share the responsibility for this mess, but
equally there are a mountain of faults that the developers are
responsible for, not least of which is the clay pit I'm sitting on.

-
[H]omer