HIGH in the East Renfrewshire hills engineers are working on a £53million project that could protect Glasgow from millions of pounds of flood damage.

£53m project to stop misery for city residents

HIGH in the East Renfrewshire hills engineers are working on a £53million project that could protect Glasgow from millions of pounds of flood damage.

It could also save families from the misery that follows incidents such as the devastating 1984 floods, which inundated more than 500 homes in the city.

Engineers are hollowing out part of the hillside to create an artificial dam which will be able to hold millions of gallons of water, several miles away from the low-lying South Side.

But the work going on in the hills, which began last year, could save the city millions of pounds in damaged property.

Cathcart, Battlefield and other communities along the banks of the White Cart have first-hand experience of the problems flooding can bring.

The river has burst its banks more than 20 times in the past 100 years, forcing thousands of residents to flee their homes.

And, in recent years, insurance companies have become cagey about providing residents with flood cover.

The White Cart, which runs through Busby, Cathcart, Pollok Country Park and Paisley before joining the Clyde at Renfrew, is normally a placid waterway.

But the water can rise more than 20ft in less than 12 hours and become a raging torrent given the right conditions.

The £53million White Cart Flood Prevention Scheme was a direct response to the flooding of the 1980s and '90s.

And experts are convinced the massive engineering work in the hills above Newton Mearns and at two other sites near Eaglesham and East Kilbride will shield the city from floods.

Between them the three reservoirs will be able to hold more than 571million gallons of water.

More than 5.2billion tonnes of earth has been displaced and most will be used for landscaping and infilling the sites.

Sandy Gillon, Glasgow City Council's transport and environmental manager, said the plan was hatched after floods hit the South Side in 1984.

He added: "We are preparing for a storm which computers calculate would be a once-in-200 years event.

"Put another way there is a half-a-per-cent chance of this happening in any given year."

He said that, if the predicted storm does hit, then 1700 homes and 40 businesses in the South Side would be at risk.

An area of Battlefield bounded by Millbrae Road, Battlefield Road and King's Park Road could, say experts, be under as much as 10ft of water.

And estimated flood damage would be more than £100million.

Mr Gillon added: "Residents have been supportive of the scheme even though a lot of work is now going on close to homes.

"These areas are dry for the vast majority of the time and the river runs through them quite peacefully.

"Effectively we are storing the water on agricultural land rather than let it go down through the city.

"If we didn't do this the water would come down like a wall and spread out in the Battlefield and Cathcart area. Even if we built walls along the banks it wouldn't stop it."

The work near Blackhouse Farm, next to Mearnskirk, is aimed at containing flooding on the Earn Water, one of the White Cart's tributaries.

As well as creating a storage reservoir capable of holding millions of gallons of water, engineers have installed devices called "hydro brakes".

They are conical shaped and the water will flow through them normally until it reaches a pre-determined height when the velocity will cause a vortex to form.

The pressure of air within the vortex will "throttle" the flow of water, slowing it down and allowing the reservoir to fill up.

Water will then be released into the White Cart in a controlled manner.

The hydro brakes being used in the White Cart scheme are the largest in the world.

Similar work is going on at Kirkland Bridge, near Eaglesham, and Kittoch Water, south of East Kilbride.

And what is now a building site and scar on the landscape will be landscaped over and look like a normal hillside once the work is complete.

Alan McGowan, project manager for contractors Halcrow, said: "We are holding the water back before it gets to the city and releasing it at a controlled rate."

He said eight water pumping stations would also be built as well as two new bridges. Two existing bridges over the river in the South Side will also be raised.

The work on the storage areas, which employs 60 people, is due to be completed by early next year.

The second phase - five miles of new embankment walls on the South Side - employs 100 people.

Stuart Eckersley, project manager for Volker Stevin, which is responsible for phase two, said: "When the river floods at the moment, major roads are closed off and there are big health and safety issues.

"There have been 20 significant floods here in the last 100 years and the work we are doing now will reduce the flood risk for 95% of the at risk properties."

Local people, he said, had been "supportive and accepting" despite work going on in some people's back gardens.

Langside Councillor Archie Graham said: "Every time there are prolonged and intense periods of rain people anxiously wait to see how high the water levels will rise in the White Cart and if they might be at risk of flooding.

"The plan to use a combination of flood storage areas and construct new flood defences downstream, along the river's corridor, will give people peace of mind that both they and their properties are safe."

Special care was taken during work on the White Cart ENGINEERS have taken special care to protect the habitats of vulnerable animals, birds and plants while working on the project. The countryside is home to creatures like otters, badgers and kingfishers. At one point work had to be halted for six weeks to allow a colony of sand martins to breed without disturbance. Environmental organisations and angling groups have been widely consulted about the impact of the work. Sandy Gillon said groups like Scottish Natural Heritage, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and the Scottish Environmental Protection Agency were heavily involved in the design of the structures. He said great care had to be taken to ensure fish could get through the White Cart when its course was diverted near Eaglesham. He added: "We have done extensive environmental work over the past six years and where we have found evidence of creatures like kingfishers or badgers we have made every effort to protect them."

Residents in Paisley were badly hit by floods in 1994 FLOODS have been a way of life in the South Side of Glasgow for more than a century. The prevention scheme currently under way was prompted by the devastating 1984 floods, which inundated more than 500 homes and caused millions of pounds of damage. Hogmanay revellers in Battlefield and Langside had to evacuate their homes when the water level rose with exceptional speed by morning hundreds of properties were under water. Only 12 days later the floods returned to exactly the same area with the same devastating results. In 1990, the long-suffering residents of the area were hit again and four years later the river burst its banks in various places including Paisley. And in December 1999, many families living in Cathcart and Langside suffered thousands of pounds of damage to their homes when they were twice inundated by waist-high flood water.