Giant flood simulator aims to help protect homes

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Andrew Tagg from HR Wallingford describes how the tests work.

The Environment Agency has stepped up its battle to ensure homes in the UK are guarded against flooding by building a living room inside a giant water tank in Wallingford. The BBC's rural affairs correspondent Jeremy Cooke takes a look around the simulator.

From the outside it looks like a giant warehouse, tucked away on the edge of an Oxfordshire business park.

But inside, the giant facility feels more like a rather damp and drab Hollywood special effects film set.

In one section there is a giant tank, about the half the size of a football pitch.

It has been filled with 196,000 gallons of water, agitated by a wave machine or forced through pumps to create a current.

It's all part of a new testing facility that simulates what happens in a flood - and the products being developed to help us protect our homes.

The agency's Robert Runcie says products will be tested there

In one area there's a mock-up of an ordinary front room that you might find in any terraced street in the country.

Outside, a metre of water is sloshing against the door and window.

It's the sort of flooding that could inundate a home and create thousands of pounds of damage.

But here, both the door and the window have been fitted with plastic flood guards, which create a watertight barrier - the modern equivalent of the good old sandbag.

And much more effective.

Expensive

Even when you open the door, the flood guard stops any water coming in.

OK, so the carpet is a little damp, but nothing like the thousands of pounds of damage which would happen if the water cascaded in, to such catastrophic effect.

So it looks like this device will be awarded the British Standards Institution "kitemark", which acts as a recommendation to consumers that a product like this does actually work.

The facility has been developed at considerable cost by the Environment Agency and HR Wallingford, a private research company.

It is hoped the mock living room will save homeowners thousands of pounds

The idea is to make specialist product testing available to small companies and innovators who might otherwise be unable to develop their ideas because of the cost of trialling them in this way.

But Robert Runcie, the Environment Agency's director of flood and coastal risk management, says the real aim is to help householders protect their property.

"The new testing facility and industry standard will help those at risk from flooding make informed choices and have confidence in the flood products they buy as well as encouraging new product development."

The key message that is being sent to homeowners who are at risk of floods is that there can be relatively inexpensive ways to protect themselves.

The first step is to go to the Environment Agency website and find out the risk of flood for your postcode.