NFRS 2023 124 - Flooding incidents

You asked for

Can I please request, in the form of a spreadsheet such as Excel or CSV file, information on flooding incidents attended by the fire and rescue service.

I would like the information to be in relation to flooding incidents caused only by severe weather (heavy rainfall).

1. I would like the total number of flooding incidents recorded by the fire andrescue service, broken down by month, for the calendar years 2013 to 16January 2024
2. In a separate tab I would like details of each flooding incident. Please include:
   • Date of incident
   • Time of day incident reported
   • Incident duration (minutes)
   • Location (please include longitude and latitude and local authority if available)
   • Total number of buildings affected
   • Total number of dwellings affected
   • Total number of firefighters injured, seriously injured or killed

If this request cannot be met within the cost limits for Freedom of Information requests, please can you provide me with advice and assistance on how I may refine my request.

Our Response

Answer: - This information is not recorded in an easily retrievable format. To locate, retrieve and extract the requested information requires a manual extraction as the incident management system does not break the data down by the total number of buildings affected. In addition, the system does not differentiate between natural flooding (weather) and that caused by infrastructure (burst pipe). We would need to manually review each incident for comments and notes to determine if the information is held.

Between the 1st of January 2013 and the 16th of January there have been 1117 incidents classified as ‘flooding’. It is estimated that to search one record would take approximately 1 minute which would equate to approximately 19 working hours (for 11 years’ worth of records). This takes the request over the cost threshold of 18 working hours and engages Section 12 (1)of the Act.

This letter constitutes a refusal notice under Section 17(5) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 with Section 12(1) of the act being applied.

12.– (1) Section 1(1) does not oblige a public authority to comply with a request for informationif the authority estimates that the cost of complying with the request would exceed theappropriate limit.

Should you wish for the Force to continue with your request, a more accurate figure will be provided within a fee’s notice. The cost will need to be paid by you, prior to any further investigation. Please advise if you wish to proceed.

Alternatively, you are invited to refine your request to bring it within the cost threshold however, due to the volume of data and the nature of the questions I am unable to offer a reasonable alternative to extract the requested information except to reduce the time period requested and to remove the total number of buildings affected.

In accordance with the Act, once one part of the request exceeds the cost threshold the entire request exceeds the cost threshold.

This letter constitutes a refusal notice under Section 17 (5) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000.