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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 |
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