February 2024 proved to be a record breaker within a record-breaking year for pumping at St Germans, the UK’s largest land drainage pumping station.

In February we pumped 58,490 Megalitres of water at St Germans, the equivalent of the volume of 14.6 Wembley Stadiums and the greatest volume we have ever pumped in a calendar month. This follows January 2024 and December 2023 also being in the top six months for pumping.

One Megalitre = 1 million litres.

With one month of our pumping year still to go, 2022/24 is already a record-breaking for year for pumping at St Germans as of the end of February we have already pumped 203,323 Megalitres, the equivalent volume of 51 full to the brim Wembley Stadiums.

There is a large network of pumping stations that feed into our 190km of watercourses that all lead to St Germans. Being below sea level, 20% of land within the catchment is already pumped twice and 60% pumped once before water gets to St Germans.

We recently hosted BBC Countryfile at St Germans to discuss energy costs and electricity standing charges. It’ll air on Sunday 10th March at 7pm on BBC1.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001x7jh

For the period October – December 2023 we pumped 80,812 Megalitres of water at St Germans Pumping Station to protect lives and livelihoods from flooding. This is the equivalent of 32,325 Olympic sized swimming pools.

This is the most we have pumped at the station over an October – December period. It is worth remembering that a significant proportion of the water pumped at St Germans has already been pumped once or twice beforehand via our Bevill’s Leam Pumping Station and/or by other Internal Drainage Boards (IDBs) via a network of over 70 pumping stations.

In the first ten days of January 2024, we have already pumped 30,453 Megalitres at St Germans. We also pumped more in December 2023 than in the whole of the 2021/22 year.

For reference, the proposed Fens Reservoir may have a 55,000 Megalitre storage capacity.

This is a herculean combined effort by your local Internal Drainage Boards.

IDBs are small public authorities constituted of members of the local agricultural and land management community along with members appointed by District Councils to represent the non-agricultural interests within an IDB’s district.

IDBs generally set their income rates based on budgeting for an ‘average’ year of pumping and generally hold small reserves to cater for wetter than average years.

Proudly managing water levels in the Fens since 1862!

Paul Burrows

Chief Executive

13/01/2024

Our response to OFGEM’s review of standing charges

We welcome OFGEM’s call for input into its review of standing charges. We feel that the Targeted Charging Review did not consider the bespoke needs and role of the Internal Drainage Board (IDB) sector within its concept and therefore its implementation has been unfair.

Here at the Middle Level Commissioners, we administer 29 smaller IDBs and 24 of which have electric powered pumping stations. We also own and operate St Germans Pumping Station, the largest land drainage pumping station in the UK. Across our portfolio of assets there are 67 electric meters and the standing charges have increased in total by 509% from £25,547 to £155,662 as a result of the Targeted Charging Review. The standing charge for St Germans Pumping Station has increased by 1282% from £3,915 to £54,140.

Paul Burrows, Chief Executive says;

“This winter is likely to prove a record breaking one for land drainage pumping here in the Fens with record volumes already having been pumped at our St Germans Pumping Station. We provide a critical public service that not only protects lives and livelihoods from flooding, but also protects key gas and electricity supply infrastructure.

The costs of pumping are substantial, and the increases we have seen to standing charges over the last 12-month have been punitively eyewatering. I urge government and OFGEM to reconsider their approach to our sector.”

Please see our full response.

Whilst the skies may be clear today, our drainage system is under stress.

Yesterday saw St Germans Pumping Station discharging 77 cubic metres of water per second. We have never previously needed to pump to this level.

There are still vast quantities of water within our system, being pumped into our system by Internal Drainage Boards and flowing into our system from saturated highland areas.

The weather forecast for overnight tonight is a cause for serious concern, with a worst-case prospect of 30-40mm. Even a more realistic forecast of 10-20mm will cause us issues unless we take further action.

We will deploy the demountable defences for the properties in Benwick as a precautionary measure during daylight today.

We will need to take the water level at St Germans as low as we can without risking bank slips in order to create the gradient in the system to be able to cater for tonight’s forecast rainfall as well as the existing water within the catchment.

For boaters moored in our main drainage system this will unfortunately mean you’ll likely experience levels fluctuating significantly higher and/or lower than normal. This will probably start to be noticeable this afternoon and evening. Please take suitable action to secure your safety.

Should the rainfall forecast materialise then levels will quickly rise and if the rainfall does not materialise then there is sufficient water coming into the system to stabilise the levels again tomorrow.

Given our changing climate, we need to explore if and how the Middle Level system could be operated more efficiently and effectively. We have produced a briefing to explain the background and context for a pumping operations trial that we recently commenced, with Storm Babet being the first test within this.

For 30 years Paul Grodkiewicz has been at the heart of our navigation service in his role as lock-keeper at Salters Lode. Paul has recently confirmed his intention to retire at the end of February 2024 and our plan is that Paul’s wife, Karen Hills, takes on the role.

I’m sure our boating community will join me in wishing Paul well in retirement and are very grateful, like we are, for his loyal and expert service. Many of you will already know Karen and I’m sure will support her as she takes on the role.

In response to the recent feedback, we are looking to fast-track the introduction of a text messaging
service for the navigation community through the use of a government platform.
We are likely to only be able, at least initially, to manage the service during working hours with
anything outside of this being on a reasonable endeavours basis.
We intend to use the service for:
• Navigation closure information
• Water level management information
• Emergency and/or urgent messages
If you wish to sign-up for this service, please email admin@middlelevel.gov.uk with the email title as
NAVIGATION TEXT SERVICE and include your name and mobile number within the email.
We will look to start to use the service as soon as practical.

Paul Burrows
Chief Executive
30 October 2023

Cambridgeshire County Council like to invite local community representatives to their Flood Action Conference which will take place on Thursday 21st September 2023 at Burgess Hall in St Ives from 10:15 to 16:30. The conference has been organised by the Community Flood Action Programme team (part of the Flood Risk team) and is open to any residents and community groups with an interest in learning more about flood resilience or establishing their own flood group. This conference follows on from a successful launch last year and will include talks and workshops by Cambridgeshire County Council, the Environment Agency, Anglian Water, Internal Drainage Boards and industry leading experts. We will also have the ‘Floodmobile’ at the event which is a vehicle demonstrating over 50 examples of flood resilience measures that householders and businesses can install. Tickets can be booked here Flood Action Conference 2023 Tickets, Thu 21 Sep 2023 at 10:15 | Eventbrite

Fascinating Fens are excited to announce the “Celebrate The Fens” Day, will be returning on 17th June 2023 (for the whole weekend 16th-18th).

There will be a mixture of actual and virtual events taking place, how will you get involved and celebrate?

Click here to read the latest newsletter.

The sanitation point at March Town Bridge, Old River Nene, is open. Currently, the information on Fenland District Council’s website is out of date.

Pump-out tickets can be bought from George Campbell Leisure Centre, for £20.