A COUNCIL chief warned his local authority faced a £13m bill for damage from one storm, as Wales braced itself for more bad weather over the weekend.
Andrew Morgan gave evidence to a Senedd inquiry into the response to storms Bert and Darragh, which wreaked havoc across Wales at the end of 2024.
The council leader said more than 400 properties in Rhondda Cynon Taf were flooded, some for the third time in recent years, with nearly seven inches of rainfall in parts.
He told the climate committee: “While river flooding in particular hit Pontypridd, that was mainly through water coming off the hills at the top of the valleys … while Pontypridd didn’t exceed storm Dennis, river gauges at three locations in the valleys did.”
The Met Office issued a yellow weather warning of wind for Friday February 21 and another yellow alert for wind and rain on Sunday February 23, which covered most of the country.
Giving evidence on February 20, Cllr Morgan, who is leader of the Welsh Local Government Association, the voice of Wales’ 22 councils, said the impact of flooding has been profound.
He warned: “Some of those affected, unfortunately, don’t have insurance and it’s affected their wellbeing and mental health.”
He estimated the cost of infrastructure damage at £8m, with a further £5m bill to replace a bridge that was washed away in Abercynon – bringing the total to £13m for Storm Bert alone.
“It was considerably damaged during Storm Dennis,” he said. “We were in the final stages of putting the new bridge in … we were due to complete the work by the end of February but in Storm Bert, the entire structure … has been swept away.”
Cllr Morgan said the council would look to develop its own mechanism, in addition to the Met Office’s yellow, amber and red weather warnings, to account for local circumstances.
He explained: “60 to 80mm of rain in a short period of time, say south of Pontypridd doesn’t cause us major issues. You get that level of rainfall in the upper Cynon and Rhondda and what we’re finding more and more is … debris is getting washed off the mountain.”
He said RCT Council finished a new Welsh Government-funded culvert a week before Storm Bert which was then “absolutely buried under 50 tonnes of material” within half an hour.
Cllr Morgan was critical of the Met Office and Natural Resources Wales (NRW), raising concerns about inconsistencies between weather warnings.
He said: “For Storm Bert … it should have been an amber warning because of the amount of rain. 7in of rain falling is not a yellow warning. If we’d have thought 7in of rain would fall in the area, we would have rung the alarm bells.”
Cllr Morgan told the committee a flood warning for Pontypridd was issued at 7.41am when water was already a foot deep in the streets of the market town.
He said: “Our officers were on the phone to NRW trying to say to them ‘issue the flood warning to residents because it’s early in the morning and the river is flooding’.
“We were being told they were carefully monitoring the situation and we were saying ‘you don’t need to monitor it – the water’s in the streets.”
He added: “The first we knew about flooding … was when our highways officer on our internal messaging system said ‘the river is flooding Pontypridd, I’m here now’.”
Llŷr Gruffydd, who chairs the committee, said: “That represents a serious failure in the systems that are supposed to protect people … are you confident we won’t see a repeat?”
Cllr Morgan replied: “I’m more confident now that warnings will be issued earlier,” but he cautioned that RCT accounts for about 25% of all the surface water flooding risk in Wales.
Andrew Stone, the council’s director of highways and engineering, described the Welsh Government’s 2016 flood response framework as “a little out of date”.
He said: “From our experiences of Storm Dennis, I suppose you could say we’ve taken a blank piece of paper and we’ve written our own.”
Janet Finch-Saunders, a Conservative member of the committee, raised concerns about inconsistency between lists of vulnerable people held by councils and utility companies.
Met Office director of services Simon Brown said people in Wales are less likely to look at forecasts than the rest of the UK, with 51% checking daily compared with 88% in Scotland.
Russel Turner, head of the Flood Forecasting Centre, which was set up after catastrophic flooding in 2007, warned the risk of extreme weather is increasing as the climate warms.
