Introduction
The flood protection industry is growing rapidly and is being pushed forward by both national policy and market forces. However, the danger of this fast pace of growth is that it is ploughing ahead without the empirical evidence needed to base design of defences on. Expert knowledge based on experience in other fields such as basement water proofing and historical repairs is invaluable but needs to be drawn together in a strategic and comprehensive way.
As a Knowledge Transfer Partnership associate at Oxford Brookes University I have been working with Aquobex to develop testing protocols for assessing the performance of different approaches to flood resilience. This two year project started in January 2017 and has been a huge success in harnessing the expert knowledge of buildings at the School of Architecture at Brookes, building on their many years of experience of testing for industry.
