How do you assess the flood risk of a potential house purchase?

Brendan Burgess

Brendan Burgess

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A friend of mine is looking at a house purchase close to the Dodder. If I were living there, I would always be on edge if it were raining heavily.

I know that there are flood defences but how well maintained will they be?

I live in Sandymount and there is a medium to long-term risk from coastal flooding. I have flood insurance but some of my neighbours can't get it. But I would imagine living close to a river would be a more imminent risk.

Brendan
 
Local knowledge on the part of longer term residents might be a useful resource in this context too? Maybe also newspaper archives?
 
"Past flood events" layer on floodinfo.ie includes reports (from councils etc.), photos and press articles. This layer is off by default.
brave_screenshot_www.floodinfo.ie.png
 
There's the flood info website as a general guide to the 10/100/1,000 year flood rate for a particular location.

But that website is an extremely loose guide, not to be relied upon in my opinion. Pretty sure that disclaimer is on the landing page as well. It's out of date and historical- tge 100 year events are becoming 10 year events etc.

I'd ignore flood defences as well as most require regular maintenance eg clearing of leaves etc. One tight budgetary year or a bad manager followed by heavy rain and you're in trouble.

Your friend could get a quote for home insurance and see if flood insurance is actually available.

And even if all of those seem good, just look at the local geography. Flood insurance will likely only last until the first event and then disappear at the next renewal.

Honestly if it's close enough to the river that these checks are necessary as opposed to just being done out of an abundance of caution, I'd walk away. There are other houses to buy and due diligence is utterly worthless if you're out of your home for a few months waiting on repairs.

Flood insurance is incidentally unobtainable for my house because it's within 100m of a major waterway, but that's irrelevant to me because most of Leinster will be underwater before my house is and I can't imagine what kind of landslide would bring my house with it. This is what I mean by looking at the local geography.
 
@Brendan Burgess

The completed River Dodder Flood Alleviation Scheme increased the flood defence levels of the lower part of the Dodder to cope with the worst modelled 1 in 200-year river and tidal event.

I have family in the area and can confirm that the Council are very proactive at clearing drains, closing storm gates, etc.

However, notwithstanding the above, Irish insurers uniformly decline to provide flood insurance for any property that is within 150m of the river. It is possible to obtain cover with a UK underwriter through a specialist broker but, as you can imagine, it’s not cheap.

So would I buy a property in the area?

Well, the risk of bad things happening is ever present but in this case I would regard it as low to moderate.

I can think of plenty of areas of Dublin where I would be far more nervous of flood risk.
 
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