Council facing bill for tens of thousands of £s for Cardenden flooding

At the Cowdenbeath area committee, Ken Gourlay, head of assets and finance said it would not qualify for the £1.7 million minimum expense under the emergency Bellwin Scheme requires.

He said: "In terms of funding, we are way off- we are sitting at tens of thousands of £s in damage.

"That probably sounds quite hard to believe given the extent of the damage for the private property owners - but we can't contribute to that."

The scheme does not allow for private property owners to claim money,

Routine maintenance works such as camera inspections is also not attributed to the scheme as funds are only for the resulting damages of the incident.

The issue was raised in questions from Cllr Darren Watt and Cllr Rosemary Liewald after local community groups claimed that Aberdeen Council had spent part of the scheme's funding on similar flooding events.

However, Mr Gourlay commented that the Scottish Government confirmed that this was not the case.

Mr Gourlay noted that the cost to the council included having crews on standby during the two flooding incidents, distributing sandbags, pumping out water to open up roads and remedial work such as taking out the heras fencing in the Den burn at Cardenden and cleaning other blockages.

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Another issue was that the burn- which was blocked and caused flooding in the area- is partly owned by private residents.

This means that the full cost has not been included in the council's overall bill.

Mr Gourlay said: "One of the jobs we've got to make sure we do over the next while with the properties involved is to make residents, particularly private residents, aware of where the responsibility starts and stops and work with them in clearing up the burn."

The Council is currently working on plans to clear the burn and to replace the bridge near the area.

Councillor Linda Erskine, convener, said: "Hopefully this flooding never ever happens again in that way, but given the way climate change is going I think it's going to be pretty difficult not to face some pretty traumatic outcomes of flooding in some constituencies."

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