DEFRA confident boosted Salisbury flood defences will protect homes
A yellow weather warning for rain is in place until Midnight on Tuesday
The Environment Agency has told us it's confident the Salisbury River Park project will protect homes previously at risk of flooding as the wet weather begins to arrive.
Yellow weather warnings are in place across South Wiltshire, with forecasters estimating downpours of up to 40 millimetres - leading to possible flooding.
Earlier this year, while the River Park project was being carried out, a number of homes on Ashley Road in Salisbury, close to the River Avon, flooded after heavy rainfall.
But Project Lead, Andy Wallis, says the new defences should prevent a repeat.
"If that same scale of flood was to occur now, we're confident that those properties would be protected by the scheme, so we wouldn't experience the same sort of flooding that occurred there," he said.
And while he's not worried about homes in the city flooding yet, Andy warned that increased rainfall and record flows could see homes at risk earlier in winter than they previously were.
He said: "At the moment, with the sort of weather warnings we got, we're not worried about flooding in in Salisbury yet.
"The sort of catchment it is, it takes sort of a long sort of build up of water within the catchment before we'd get worried about flooding here.
"But that's not to say that clearly later in the winter we won't be worried to be already having these sort of rain warnings this early in the in the winter does does mean that we get a little bit more nervous about these things turning into more flooding events later on in the winter."
Andy told Greatest Hits Radio that they're not able to eliminate the risk of flooding, saying an 'extreme event' could overtop the defences but that his confidence in their ability to protect at risk homes is based on data from many previous years.
But with weather warnings for heavy rainfall becoming an increasingly regular occurrence, it reinforces the schemes need.
He said: "The climate is changing. We can't say how much or you know how it's doing, but it's becoming sort of increasingly obvious that these flood events are happening on a more regular basis.
"Certainly the more sort of lower flood events are happening a lot more than we used to see them in the past, so that does really reinforce the need for schemes like this that can reduce flooding and when we can do them alongside providing other benefits, then it's a bit of a win-win."