UNESCO article, flooding

Short piece on a couple of Liverpool Echo articles-

http://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/news/liverpool-news/could-new-everton-stadium-affect-12805656
http://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/sport/football/football-news/bramley-moore-stadium-global-warming-12808366

¨The new Everton stadium could be built at Bramley Moore Dock without damaging Liverpool’s World Heritage status, council officials believe.

Liverpool is on UNESCO’s list of World Heritage Sites in danger thanks to concerns over the £5bn Liverpool Waters scheme.

And while council officials say a stadium could potentially further risk Liverpool’s WHS status, they believe it can be designed in a way that would satisfy UNESCO and preserve the dock’s heritage.
Meanwhile the council will tomorrow hold a public consultation event about the future of Liverpool’s World Heritage status.

Bramley Moore Dock is part of the massive Liverpool Waters scheme to regenerate the city’s northern docklands. It had been earmarked for housing before developer Peel agreed terms with Everton for a new stadium there."

Sensible and predictable responses from the council, if they stated that it couldn't be designed to satisfy ICONOS and UNESCO then it would almost certainly be dead in the water as a project. As stated in an earlier post the WHS status is the key planning issue involved in the construction of a new stadium at Bramley Moor Dock. 

What is interesting in the article is that Everton think they can enhance by improving public access (views of the docklands). Will be interesting to see whether they can get the heritage bodies to buy into this. As stated previously... their key concern is the setting of the dock (low rise, sparse)... and if you take that away then the docks aren`t unique... have no Outstanding Universal Value... and WHS will be lost... or maybe they will agree.

Second article is on flooding. As a planning issue- there are three issues.

1. Everton have to comply with LCC local policy on this, which they are clearly aware of. See reference in the stadium document LCC produced for the stadium proposal- there is a line in there referring to ´Climate Change Adaptation´ or something along those line. Standard practice is to produce a flood model, calculate how high the worst case flood (taking into account sea level change over 60 years) would be and design the infrastructure so it is protected from floods of a certain height. (note- protected, not necessarily above.)

2. Are you using up functional floodplain, i.e. if there is heavy rain, is your infrastructure going to cause increased risk of flooding up or downstream. Filling in a dock means the answer is certainly yes, however the increase . Like for like replacement of flood capacity storage is likely somewhere along the mersey- very low cost and low impact.

3. If worst case climate change predictions come to pass (and most evidence currently shows this is pretty likely), urban sites like this will be protected by flood defences.

...y ya está...