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Package Overview

Many brownfield and contaminated sites are in flat, low lying areas, often encroaching onto the floodplain. There are a number of environmental risks which may arise from this proximity. Extreme flooding can mobilize contaminated sediments in river beds, deposit them on the flood plain and create new surface contamination of land, as happened in a dramatic and extensive way in the central European floods in 2001. The hydraulic surcharge from flooding can be expected to mobilize pollutants from contaminated land back into surface water. Climate change will lead to changes in the magnitude and frequency of flooding, and in baseflows in watercourses. Both types of change will alter the mobility of pollutants between contaminated land and watercourses. However, good engineering design might allow such brownfields to be used for both redevelopment and flood storage while avoiding these risks.

This project, which runs until 2009, examines whether flood redevelopments can be designed to reduce the impacts of flooding while providing security to occupants and not mobilising contaminants and sediments. It also estimate the possible effects of climate change on the above. The project is principally based on a modelling approach where a range of earthwork designs will be simulated for affects on floods.

Package organisation:

David Lerner	Project Director	University of Sheffield, Groundwater Protection & Restoration Group	0114 2225743 d.n.lerner@sheffield.ac.uk
Adrian Saul	Investigator	University of Sheffield, Water and Environmental Management	0114 222 5068 a.j.saul@sheffield.ac.uk
Jacqueline Diaz Nieto	Researcher	University of Sheffield, Catchment Science Centre	0114 22 25786 j.diaz@sheffield.ac.uk

 

 

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