Bury St Edmunds A143 Compiegne Way flooding continues to pose ‘challenges’ for engineers – with ‘no end date’ set for repair works

Highways bosses are unable to say when a key road into Bury St Edmunds will reopen.

John Clements, assistant director of highways services at Suffolk County Council, said engineers were still trying to clear flood water at Compiegne Way to enable them to investigate the root of the problem.

The road has been closed for more than two weeks following Storm Henk - causing frustration for motorists and businesses.

“The challenge we have got is that we have had a wet autumn, probably since October last year, including three storms that have put a lot of water into the ground,” John Clements told Radio Suffolk this morning.

“The challenge that we have got at the moment, is that whilst we have had rain for a few days now, it is the ground water level that is particularly high and that is challenging us in getting rid of the water to enable our teams to go and get to the drainage infrastructure to sort out the problem.

“Just before the weekend, we removed and awful lot of water and brought the levels down, however ground water has increased the level of flooding there, even though we haven’t had any rain over that weekend.

“We are still looking to remove more water this week to enable our teams to get there. One of the things we are looking at today is whether we can pump into one of the adjoining systems to enable us to remove that water a little bit quicker, so can get out teams in there, get ourselves to the pumps, understand what the problem is and get the road back open.”

Suffolk County Council said more than 300,000 litres of water has been removed since Thursday.

Asked if an end date was in sight for the works, Mr Clements said: “Unfortunately, not at the moment. I don’t want to commit to a date.

“The challenge is that until we can look at those assets, it’s difficult to know exactly what the challenges are.

“We recognise that silt levels are high in that location, so normally without the severe weather, it’s what we call a dirty route, as we have lots of HGVs and others, dropping a whole load of silt onto the network.

“I don’t necessarily think that was the entire challenge but I think because of the high levels of flood water, and also the top soil coming from adjacent lands, unfortunately that silted up what we’ve got.

“We need to go and checks the pumps, we need to check the pipes and so on, clean them out, sometimes they might need replacing because they have burnt out because they have been silted up.

“Until we can get in there and understand what we need to do, it’s quite difficult to be able to, unfortunately, tell people exactly when we are going to have the road open and we do empathise with the residents of surrounding areas and the businesses – and apologise the road is not open.”

Suffolk Highways took mitigation measures in April this year, which included removing more than 100 tonnes of silt from the drainage system and installing new pumps, but flooding has persisted.