AWE nearly inundated by 2007 floods

Wednesday, October 15, 2008

Last summer's floods nearly overwhelmed the facilities where Britain's nuclear deterrent is built and maintained, a report has found.

The Atomic Weapons Establishment site at Burghfield in Berkshire was inundated by flood waters which put the facility out of use for 10 days and saw a reduced workload at the establishment for the following nine months. The surging floodwaters disabled all of the radiation detection alarms, according to a Channel 4 investigation.

Part of the factory came close to being completely flooded which would have caused catastrophic damage both to Britain's nuclear deterrent and to the environment.

Had flood waters reached certain sensitive parts of the factory, it could have led to the spread of radioactive material that could have forced the evacuation of thousands of people and left some areas near the factory uninhabitable for centuries.

According to documents released under the Freedom of Information Act, all of the buildings at the Burghfield facility experienced some degree of flooding last July with some immersed in as much as two feet of water. The documents reveal that there were "near misses" at a number of facilities and that some radioactive material took weeks to salvage from the flood damaged buildings.

There was also a certain degree of chaos in the lines of communication. Flooding is considered a nuclear critical event. When lower level staff attempted to act they were held up by the chain of command and had trouble getting authorisation to act. Managers were hard to reach and decisions were delayed for hours and sometimes days.

To make matters even more difficult, preparatory measures taken against potential flooding that began in 1999 and 2000 had not been completed in 2007.

Liberal Democrat Nick Harvey was outraged by the report. He said: "This is just not good enough. Nuclear weapons sites should be capable of withstanding attacks by enemies and terrorists, but these seem to have been unable even to resist the rain.

"A full inquiry needs to be held to get to the bottom of what happened and to ensure that such near misses can never take place again."