“A new resilience plan is needed for the City” says Strategy chief Cllr Steve Galloway in the wake of 6 weeks of “terrible weather”.
“I’ll be asking Council officials to work with partners to ensure that the City can deal better with extreme weather conditions in the future.
While a lot of attention was given to the Councils own snow and icy clearing capacity during a review of processes last summer, many difficulties have been experienced by other public services as a result of consistently low temperatures.
There were numerous complaints about failed water supplies. Some were experienced as a result of failures in the Yorkshire Water main supply pipes while others were a result of vulnerable domestic systems.
Now we are seeing emerging problems with bust pipes as the temperature rises.
We will all be watching how the thaw affects river levels in the City over the next few days.
All public service providers need to ensure that they have the capacity to deal with the demands that may be placed on their services even during holiday periods. It is particularly important that 2 way communications with affected customers are maintained.
It certainly wasn’t easy to communicate with Yorkshire Water and some Housing Associations over the last week. All public service bodies need to introduce a system where electronic communications can be dealt with 24/7 when necessary.
I will be asking Council officials to review the water supply and heating supplies in Council properties and to ensure that we are able to deal quickly with faults affecting vulnerable residents.
It may be that we need to invest more in lagging supply pipes in some of our properties and initiatives like this should also form part of a general review of the winter arrangements”.
