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More long term support needed for families displaced by flooding say researchers

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Planning for the emotional aftermath of devastating floods is as important as dealing with the immediate impact of such emergencies, say researchers from the Hull Floods project at Lancaster University.

As local councils brace themselves for the estimated £400m repair bill for damage caused by the recent storms and flooding, Dr Rebecca Whittle, Lecturer at Lancaster University’s Lancaster Environment Centre said "It’s actually about what comes after - it’s about that long and very protracted recovery period. It’s about that secondary trauma of having to deal with insurers and builders - trying to recover some semblance of normal family life."

A new short film released this week, entitled 'Life after Flooding', and funded by the ESRC, shows how these academics worked with 50 Hull residents for two years following the floods of 2007. During the deluge the city received a sixth of its annual rainfall in just 12 hours. More than 10,500 homes were evacuated and many were unable to return to them for over two years.

The researchers asked those who had been most affected to keep a diary, and brought them together for regular group discussions. Dr Marion Walker, Senior Research Associate at Lancaster University Environment Centre, says parents and teachers were also worried about the youngsters who had been displaced. She said: "We realised then that it was important to talk to the children and young people to find out how they were coping."

So they encouraged them to draw and write storyboards about their experiences. The researchers found it was a very therapeutic way for the youngsters to deal with their trauma. Ian Lamb, Education Coordinator for Hull City Council, said: "It allowed us to work in a more emotional way. I think if we hadn't done that with these children then certainly their outcomes and attainment would have suffered. We built that into the curriculum and certainly into the social way that we dealt with families."

The findings of the Hull Floods Project have influenced government policy - but researchers feel more could still be done. For instance - it should become educational policy that young people severely affected by the disruption caused by flooding carry a record of what happened to them throughout their school life so teachers understand its impact.

In addition, Save the Children UK invited them to work with them to develop a set of resources to help young children and their carers to process their emotions after a disaster.

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Notes for editors

  1. The ESRC is the UK's largest organisation for funding research on economic and social issues. It supports independent high quality research which has an impact on business, the public sector and the third sector. The ESRC's total budget for 2013/14 is £212 million. At any one time the ESRC supports over 4,000 researchers and postgraduate students in academic institutions and independent research institutes.
  2. The ESRC also produced an impact case study on this report
  3. The findings were directly quoted in The Pitt Review, the Government's national inquiry into the 2007 floods. The inclusion of the research enabled the Pitt Review to focus more strongly on the previously neglected area of long-term flood recovery; earlier drafts of the report concentrated more narrowly on flood warnings and emergency response. 
  4. The project team also provided evidence to Defra consultations on flooding, recommending a locally-flexible scheme to subsidise the implementation of flood resistance and resilience measures, and close liaison with local communities throughout the process. All these suggestions were incorporated by Defra as part of its property level flood protection grant scheme.
  5. The Cabinet Office also utilised the research findings in their Strategic National Framework on Community Resilience document. Cabinet officials commented on how helpful it was to learn from the diaries of participants themselves about their experiences.
  6. The international charity Save the Children invited the researchers to develop a set of resources to help children and young people in the UK to deal with their emotions following on from a disaster, feeding into the charity’s work in disaster relief management.
  7. Further information can be obtained from the project website. 
  8. Lancaster University uses its expertise to shape policy, encourage debate and make a difference to people’s lives. One of a few collegiate universities in the UK, Lancaster is ranked in the top 1 per cent of universities in the world and ranked consistently high for employability and in student satisfaction ratings. Following the latest research assessment exercise over 90 per cent of the research at Lancaster was found to be world leading or internationally significant with some key areas of research ranked top in the UK. Lancaster is a member of the N8 Group - a research partnership of the top 8 most research intensive universities in the North of England.

Susie Watts 
Email: susie.watts@esrc.ac.uk 
Telephone: 01793 413119

The Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)

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