Medium risk surface water flooding

Deedoodee

The house I’ve offered on has a medium risk of surface water flooding. It didn’t bother me initially because my parents house is listed as medium risk and it’s never flooded in 20 years. The flat I’m currently in is ‘high risk’ and again not seen or heard of a flood issue with the building/ street. Checking on local news and twitter, the area didn’t flood last week, though a lot of the news was focused on an area nearby which was heavily flooded. 

So like I said, it didn’t bother me before but now starting to have doubts. How concerning is a ‘medium risk’ surface flooding? 

Teapot55

‘Flood risk from rivers or the sea

Medium risk means that each year this area has a chance of flooding of between 1% and 3.3%. This takes into account the effect of any flood defences in the area. These defences reduce but do not completely stop the chance of flooding as they can be overtopped, or fail’.

The above is copied from https://check-long-term-flood-risk.service.gov.uk/map 

Hope this is a help. 

ciderboy2009

If it's just surface water flooding then I would suggest ignoring it - from my experience, surface water flood predictions are 100% guesswork!

My house is high risk - a neighbour has lived here sinc ethe house was built in the 1930's and has never known of any surface water flooding in the area.

canaldumidi

Trouble is that, as they say with stock market investments, 'past perfomance is not a guide to future performance'. And flooding of every sort is increasing.

'Surface water flooding' relates mainly to the inability of road and other drains to handle large downpours of rain - which seem to be increasing in both intensity and frequency.

But, if one avoids all properties with this risk level, half the country's properties would be excluded from your search I suspect.....

Maybe the answer is personal inspection and assessment of risk. If the property is set back from, and slightly higher than the road, and the ground level behind is lower than the property, then the actual risk is probably negligible, and the property has been classified that way since it falls 'within an area of xxx risk'.

Deedoodee

Thanks for the replies. I think I find it hard to understand what it means in real terms and, like canaldumidi said most of the houses houses in the area Im looking are considered medium risk and a lot of the ones that have come on the market in the past 6 months are medium risk.

Sistergold

My house came up as high risk. Was also concerned but just went ahead with the purchase based on the fact that it had not flooded before. I think with climate change flooding can happen to most of us. Best to deal with it then. 🤷‍♀️