Lessons learnt from the December 2015 flood event in Cumbria, UK

The December 2015 floods in Cumbria, north-west England, UK, were preceded by 3 weeks of extremely wet weather, which prompted the highway bridge management team of Cumbria County Council to review their response procedures. The events of 4–6 December proved that the council’s procedures were up to the task of protecting the public from the risks of road flooding and bridge collapse, but that their resources were overstretched by the scale of the damage and the need to assess accurately the condition of closed bridges before they could be returned to service. After a year of inspections and damage reviews, measures have been identified to improve the resilience of the bridge stock, but potential areas for improvement exist in the methodology currently mandated for the assessment of risk to highway structures. It is hoped that this paper will act as a prompt to review these methods and give the guidance needed to identify the more significant factors that contribute to the overall safety of bridge structures, so that maintaining authorities can focus their efforts, and limited resources, more effectively.