Here at Flood Technology Group, we’re at the very forefront of bringing property flood resilience measures into the 21st century, but what sets our technology apart from more traditional approaches?
Historically, efforts to protect homes and businesses from flooding have largely focused on what are known as ‘resistance’ and ‘resilience’ measures. Flood resistance measures prevent, delay or limit the amount of water entering a property, whereas flood resilience involves the use of materials, products and construction techniques to adapt the inside of a property to minimise the damage caused if floodwater enters.
In stark contrast, our property flood resilience measures harness the game-changing power of technology with a proven ability to completely evade flood water. In other words, rather than trying to limit the amount of water entering a property or making the clean-up easier after a flood event, our products are capable of not only sensing an impending flood but automatically rising above the water level and staying there until the danger has passed.
For example, our multiple-purpose Flood Adaptive Platform is a groundbreaking mechanical jack system designed to automatically elevate above the rising water. This revolutionary technology has already been applied to mobile homes and modular buildings, highlighting its ability to protect properties and their contents from the threat of flooding, but its potential is limitless. In fact, it can be used to protect a vast range of infrastructure across many different sectors, from utilities and energy to commercial and transportation.
We recently created the first fully flood adaptive holiday homes here in the UK by retrofitting our Flood Adaptive Platform to lodges on a holiday park in Warwickshire, which had been affected by flooding on several previous occasions. Traditional property flood resilience measures may have helped to limit the amount of water entering the holiday homes and make the clean-up process quicker, but the owner of the park can now rest safe in the knowledge that, whenever the River Avon is in flood, his holiday homes will automatically rise above the water and remain there until it’s safe to return to ground level. This means that, once the flood water subsides, the owner won’t face a costly clean-up and repair bill or lose out on bookings from customers.
With climate change increasing the frequency and scale of flood events, we believe that property flood resilience measures must also continue to evolve if we’re to keep our homes, businesses and infrastructure safe. This is particularly important in flood-prone and coastal areas, where the impact on tourism hits business owners hard.
For example, there are approximately 365,000 caravan holiday homes and an additional 100,000 residential park homes in the UK, but around 73,000 holiday caravans and 10,000 park homes are at moderate or significant risk of flooding. What’s more, in the region of 20,000 caravan pitches in the UK are not even being used due to flood risk, according to data from the National Caravan Council.
We’re delighted to be working with tourism businesses in several different areas of the country to help them future-proof their operations against the growing flood risk that we face.
Story by Flood Technology Group
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