The commercial cost of flooding for tourist attractions

Over the last three decades, we’ve worked with a variety of commercial businesses from industrial bakeries and car manufacturing plants to pharmaceutical firms and food processing companies, mainly to deliver trade effluent monitoring and sampling. But a recent (and ongoing) monitoring project at a UK zoo got the whole team thinking about the potential commercial cost of flooding for tourist attractions.

An overview

Last autumn, in their drive to monitor the sewage network across their catchment, a UK water company enlisted our services to install water flow and level monitoring equipment in manholes across the region. Several of these manholes were located at locations throughout a zoo. One of the key objectives for water company and the zoo’s Health & Safety Officer, was to tackle the impact of flooding in the zoo.

As recently as September 2023, areas of the zoo were damaged following intense rainfall that led to flooding. This resulted in a number of the park’s areas being inaccessible to visitors whilst repairs were made. Monitoring was therefore implemented to provide advance notice of flooding events and event duration in order to inform the zoo’s action plan as well as to mitigate the impact of flooding on animals, visitors, car parks and road access.

Financial impact

Floods have a financial impact wherever and whenever they hit. Insurance broker, Marsh Commercial, estimates that the average cost of flood damage in a commercial setting is around £80,000. It also states that a small business can lose up to 50 working days following a flood event. At the same time, the effect on the workforce, clients and reputation should not be underestimated.

The September floods will undoubtedly have had a financial impact on the attraction. Flooded paths had to be repaired. Staff will have been taken away from their usual duties to attend to issues caused by the flooding. This will have caused internal disruption and possibly led to additional costs for specialist subcontractors and other personnel to establish the zoo’s normal operating environment.

Any business, whether it’s a wildlife park or a pea processing plant, is there to make a profit. And floods, unexpected or otherwise, can inflict a vicious dent in a bottom line.

Can the commercial cost of flooding be mitigated?

Good news. The simple answer is: “yes it can”. Both the water company and the zoo’s proactive approach to tackling future flooding is the first step. Recruiting the services of a professional environmental monitoring company, such as Detectronic, is the second. Implementing a structured monitoring programme, gathering data and analysing that data is the third step. Only by fully understanding what is happening inside the sewer network can any business or leisure attraction put itself in the position of being able to prevent future flooding and pollutions, thus negating the risk of financial implications associated with the severe weather events that are becoming increasingly prevalent.

Over at the zoo, the comprehensive data that is being gathered every day by each of the sensors placed in the manholes across the attraction is sent to our dedicated in-house Data Centre for detailed analysis and reporting. Plus, the incumbent wastewater provider is also able to see the data in Stormharvester, an AI analytics platform, which further informs the creation of predictive analytics. By taking all of the steps outlined above, the zoo’s operations team is not only helping to secure the financial future of the attraction but also taking responsibility for its overall environmental impact.

If you’d like to find out more about implementing wastewater monitoring for your commercial business, please contact us on 01282 449124 or email: sales@detectronic.org