St. Clears Flooding Support & Action Group

This evening (13/11/2025), we had a very productive meeting tonight to discuss the concerns highlighted at last night's flood meeting. Thank you to everyone who attended and shared their input.

We understand that residents are worried, and we want to ensure everyone has a chance to be heard and get involved in finding solutions, so, a follow-up meeting has been organised specifically for St. Clears residents who were recently affected by the floods, including those wish to volunteer.

🗓️ Wednesday, 19/11/2025

⏰ 18:00

📍 The Black Lion, Pentre Road

We will again be discussing residents' concerns and looking at ways to move forward together. We ask that no residents try and sell any goods (such as flood defenses) as we want to push the local authority, Welsh Government & Natural Resources Wales to provide full support for the residents affected.

Crucially, it is imperative that we come together now to support your community. We are urgently seeking volunteers to donate their time to support residents and the wider community during future flooding events. This is a time of need, and we must unite and work together.

We must not be against one another. Now is the time for action and community spirit, not a time for complaining. Let's channel our energy into constructive solutions and supporting our neighbours who have been impacted.

Please attend the meeting next Wednesday if you are a resident, or reach out if you can volunteer your time to help! We ask that if you can attend next weeks meeting, that you opt-in to volunteer - remember, there are families who live in these houses, people left without houses before Christmas.

The following are the notes brief from the meeting

Summary of St Clears Flood Support Meeting held 12/11/25 in Black Lion

Objective

Establish a self-help group to consider how local residents could prepare for a future flooding event, including before, during and after and where they could find sources of help, both physical and mental..

Around 20 people attended, apologies received from Cllr Philip Hughes on health grounds and Cllr Carys Jones due to prior commitments in Llansteffan (her own community) with regards to flooding. Many thanks for the Black Lion for providing a room & refreshments.

Agreed that the Nov 4th flood was an extreme event with exceptional rainfall & high tide. High tide warning somewhere visible/accessible in advance would be useful. Last week there seemed to be a sudden water surge around 10-10.30pm for unknown reasons as tide/rainfall had dropped. Sewerage is an additional issue.

NRW Floodline 0345 988 1188 is useful but there are so many messages that it is easy to overlook an essential one. Register to receive phone & text alerts.

Early warning essential eg: electronic device/float with a visible flag by bridge – NRW do this on a regular basis daily.

Sandbags – where to store/how to manage so go where needed most.

A store per street with a sandbag monitor? Cost of sandbags to Council for supplying AND for disposal as contain contaminants from flood water so expensive. Useful but not always effective (last week the water was too high to be held back) & the bags deteriorate with time.

Learn from others

Llansteffan Flood Group has experience and could share this. Whitland also? Funding sources? How are the groups organised?

Establish where water flows are from – not just river water as sewerage comes down from new developments (eg: by roundabout) – more control needed at development planning stage to ensure adequate mitigation/attenuation ponds and enforced to make sure it is done properly. Proposal for 150 houses next to the McDonald site need to be assessed for mitigation measures as run-off from here may exacerbate the flooding problem in the town. Some water runs in to old stone culverts and physically it is impossible to check the condition of these with a camera. This water used to be tankered away regularly but no longer. NRW deny responsibility for this so who should be doing it? Have the developments completed their SUDS water management requirements?

Support network needed with local community & emergency services. County Council is reactive not proactive (cost / budget constraints).Black Lion has offered a warm space with tea / coffee (bar will be closed outside normal hours) & those affected can bring blankets etc & also dogs on leads / cats in baskets. Mary Kate the manager lives on site & this offer is available 24hrs..

ESSENTIAL

• Collect personal experiences , with photos, of flooding events – time, where, height, what happened (eg: elderly residents on own in house). These summaries can be left at Black Lion. A GP letter explaining the impact the flooding has had on mental health/whether self-shielding etc is a valuable document and all affected are recommended to speak to surgery. Note from school useful if children are impacted. All this builds up a picture of the event/future events to make a case for funding.

• Dredging rivers/maintenance of road drains with road sweeper used to be a regular occurrence but less so now. Drains are full of silt etc and do not function properly. A new, larger capacity bridge was once proposed to replace the existing one by chip shop but stopped due to objections. Funding was previously identified for dredging but nothing was done.

• Road closure to avoid wash from passing cars? Not permitted by residents – need to investigate working with emergency services? SARS Cymru can liaise with Dyfed Powys Police on this.

• Welsh Water pumps – were these working as there is a view they were looked at the next day. Are these working effectively and are they maintained?

• Simon from Floodgate Ltd explained about flood gates & brought samples of equipment. Advised that all equipment installed should be independently tested

• Carms CC has £500 grant for houses flooded internally (£1000 for those with no insurance). All councils in England offer a £5000 grant to flooded householders.

Action:

Write to local MP/MS & Councillors to ask why this £5k grant isn’t available here. Keep asking until get an answer. Please do this as an individual and as part of Flood Action Group

Independent sources of funding & information:

• National Flood Forum based in Worcester: https://nationalfloodforum.org.uk/. (Also has a directory of flood products on blue pages of website)

• Flood Mary (set up by individual who flooded herself): https://floodmary.com/

Insurance:

• Flood Re is a reinsurance scheme which will allow insurance companies to offer more affordable flood cover to those living in high risk areas. https://www.floodre.co.uk/

• Build Back Better scheme – designed to reduce cost & impact of future flooding by including property resilience methods as part of flood repairs https://www.floodre.co.uk/buildbackbetter/

• SARS Cymru will visit, assess area & speak to those affected and produce a plan of water route-ways. Flood meeting to be arranged & will invite NRW, Welsh Water, Dyfed Powys Police, County Councillors – details (date & time) to be confirmed.

Actions for SARS Cymru to complete - the next steps for us & our views

• Attend the meeting on Wednesday, 19/11/2025 to hear residents concerns

• Approach Welsh Water to query regarding pumps they recently allegedly replaced - we will query when the original issue was raised, when they were replaced, how much it cost, why they needed to be replaced and what impact this has on the community.

• Put in place a Flood Action Plan as a general all-wales guide for community members and councils.

• Attend the area, fly a drone, assess via google earth and mapping equipment.

• We will close a road if peoples safety is at risk, with or without police present to allow emergency services quick access - we will approach the local authority or community council for x4 road closed signs and cones. We have previously closed roads for Local Authorities, and previously the Police (an example of this was in Pendine when a tree was down. We diverted traffic an alternative route - more recently, we closed a lane into Aberporth due to the road lifting until Local Authority attended).

• Ask Carms CC & NRW to attend with SARS Cymru to do an assessment of the rivers running into the village of St. Clears, including to highlight what went wrong.

• Once a flood plan has been created, request a meeting with Senedd Members for the area, county & town/community councillors, Dyfed-Powys Police, NRW & Welsh Water.

Our Response to the Meeting

We strongly believe we can create a solid plan to help support the community and its members - we do ask that people be patient. We will support wherever we can in the meantime with flooding, sandbagging, flood defenses if people wish to purchase these from reliable places. We advise residents who were affected by the flooding put themselves forward to volunteer if physically able to. We ask residents in neighbouring vacinities support the cause of sandbagging, especially as the riverbank collapsed and caused major failure, and with how quick it came up.

The CEO (Ajay Owen) resides roughly 10 miles from St. Clears. It takes 20 minutes to attend in-person. The COO (Tracy Pritchard) resides in Narberth but does not have readily available transport - we will negotiate a plan with relevant services the best to our ability with relevant services. The Regional Officer for SARS Cymru (Carmarthenshire) is Jordan Rice (resides near Ammanford) who has readily available transport. It is essential we have funds for travel costs to & from St. Clears so we ask that you please donate as much as possible to us and add a note to the donation "St. Clears" to allow us to create a space in our bank for this fund. You can donate money here: https://pay.sumup.com/b2c/QYWIP1VA - please note that there is a transaction fee for us

Depending on how busy the organisation is on the day of flooding, etc, times may vary and residents will have to scramble together to support one-another. The Black Lion has kindly offered a place to be a Safe Place if residents homes flood. We want to work with the statutory services to highlight residents who are of priority, who will need to be evacuated first (vulnerable, mental health, care needs, etc). Emergency Services will support those who need it on-scene, but we wish to create a seamless way to work together to minimise any stand-by time & hinder any evacuations or rescues.

We have created an Alert Channel on WhatsApp - you can follow here: https://whatsapp.com/channel/0029VbBWqHRJZg4FbIGIUR30 - make sure you follow the channel and click the bell icon to recieve notifications. Alerts will be issued on here from reliable sources such as Met Office, Natural Resources Wales & Statutory Services. We also ask you subscribe to notifications directly from all agencies - all relevant links can be found on our Short URL: https://www.linktr.ee/sarscymru - or on our Facebook page by clicking "Learn More."

Actions for the Community to complete - the steps for the community and surrounding residents

• Report any community concerns to their local authority

• If roads need street sweeping, report this to Highways via FixMyStreet: https://www.fixmystreet.com/

• Raise complaints to the local authority regarding the effect on their health, mental health and well-being.

• Collate a folder of images, sick notes, invoices and bills, insurance claims - anything flood related regarding their claims/flood concerns.

• Write letters expressing their dissatisfaction of the failings of Agencies and the impact this has had on them as a family, or as individuals (or both) - "Impact Statements."

• Write to Assembly Members, Members of Parliament & Press, if needs must.

• Scramble together to support the community and create a solid action plan, with or without agencies there.

• We ask that you do not over-stress General Practitioners with appointments regarding mental health. An individuals mental health would be impacted as a result of what has happened. We are not saying do not go, but to please consider if you do need to go or not.

Additionally, we want to add that we are NOT a statutory service, or a company that has thousands of pounds in the bank (we wish). We solely rely on donations to keep operating - any abuse towards volunteers will NOT be tolerated.

We are volunteering our time to advocate, support and advise for the communities behalf the best we can.

This is why we ask for donations as we need equipment to begin developing as an organisation and be as prepared as possible.

🔗 | If you want to express your views, please do by emailing us: hello@sarscymru.org.uk.