After the hottest and driest June on record, a cloud burst over the city of Drogheda yesterday sent down rain that was tropical in its intensity.
Within minutes areas of the town were flooded with roads running with water like rivers. Flooding on the Bridge of Peace caused traffic chaos and some roads were impassable for a time.
Almost instantly social media was flooded with photos and videos showing the deluge in various places with shops in the Laurence Centre flooded and McDonnel’s Centra Store in Hardman’s Gardens badly hit.
Louth County Council was also flooded with media and general queries and this afternoon they issued the flowing update:
“A thundery cloud burst lasting only a few minutes inundated storm water drainage infrastructure causing instant flooding of roads and pavements at various locations in the Drogheda Town area.
The road gullies are only designed to cater for 2 inches of rain per hours and this intense downpour exceeded design of pipes and sewers. 90% of the water collection network are combined sewers (foul and storm) shared with Uisce Éireann and are of limited capacity.
Manholes lids were blown off by the pressure of high flows in Trinity Street and had to be quickly replaced as the flood waters eased by Louth County Council crews.
There were several areas instantly flooded yesterday afternoon in the downpour – Hardman gardens, Trinity St., Cement Road and Bridge of Peace as the cloud burst moved south to north across town.
Louth County Council Fire crews were immediately on hand with high volume pumping equipment at Hardman gardens to quickly drain the flooded areas before it flooded even more property.
Louth County Council also have hundreds of sandbags pre-filled for these kinds of scenarios and we freely give these to properties which were susceptible to flooding in past e.g. at Ship Street.
Separately we understand the flooding in shopping centre was a roofing issue which is being rectified by the centre themselves and not related to road flooding per se.
It is believed that the intensity of the downpour was the cause of flash flood yesterday.
Louth County Council have a rigorous gully cleaning regime and all gullies are kept clean and free flowing by our crews proactively cleaning all 3,000 gullies in the town.
