Over the Winter and Spring Downwood Way has regularly flooded with up to 500mm of water damaging some cars and providing entertainment for ‘Boy Racers’. The Highways team at Hampshire County Council had been flat out dealing with flooding which was a threat to homes, and did say they would come up with a permanent solution.
Richard Peach, one of the Highways Engineers who looks after our area has been back in touch and sent me a drawing showing the planned modifications to the below ground drainage that will stop this happening in the future.
The current arrangement drains the storm water into soakaways. This is good as it reduces the amount Southern Water need to treat, but when the groundwater level rises too much the soakaways become less effective which results in this area flooding.
The solution is to install a overflow pipe into the permanent drainage so that the soakaway is used most of the time, but the road will drain into a sewer if it starts to flood.
Richard advises he has secured the funding to carry out this work this year, and hopefully it will be complete in time for this winter. Thank you Richard for sorting this out for us.
horndeanmatters 
This sounds like a positive step forward, however, after all the work done to the area around the sliproad joining London Road just before going under the Montorway, we are now seeing water coming from the farmland to the east of the A3M running off and causing flooding in the road which the renewed soakaways are not coping with.