To all members of our community living in Chard, commercial colleagues and visitors.

The Mayor, Councillors and staff at Chard Town Council are sad (and frustrated) that we had to respond, yet again, to significant storm damage and threat to life & limb within our town and adjacent rural area last weekend.

You will see from some Facebook posts that there is deep frustration within our community and a certain amount of confusion and misinformation about who does what, what has been done and even who or what “the Council” is.

This note is to reassure you that you are not alone and to give information, first hand, about what is going on now in the aftermath.

The first matter is an internal Chard Town Council debrief to collate matters at a local level, such as evidence for future scheme requests and assess the overall impact on the Chard area.  CARG is part of this process and has undertaken significant work to evaluate locations and evidence from social media and other platforms.  This shows the value of you putting evidence straight on to the CARG Facebook page as incidents are on-going.  This is now approaching 70 locations (not houses but wider locations) across the Chard area and will be a massive input to following up.  Thank you CARG and all volunteers.

Finally, for this note, Chard Town Council is not the Highway Authority, Planning Authority or Civil Contingencies.  It is not a Category 1 responder.  However, as a very Local Council along with our magnificent volunteer groups, we will follow up on these matters and press for the storm water issues to be resolved at or near source so that we concentrate of attenuation and alleviation schemes rather that evacuating and mopping up.  As I type, our Operations Manager is setting up follow up meetings with those Agencies who, we think, can help.

This is such a sad time for many of our community, but it was heartening to see the community spirit demonstrated during the crisis.

Regards,

David

David Bell

Chief Executive & Town Clerk

Chard Town Council