A TAVISTOCK-based company which designs flood gates has successfully protected a town in New Zealand from severe flooding.

The gates in question, which are 20 metres wide and three metres high and were designed and supplied by Flood Control International in Tavistock, saved Paeroa, a town in New Zealand’s northern island, this week in the wake of Cyclone Gabrielle. The innovative design of the gates allows them to be quickly deployed across a state highway in advance of floods and also retracted so that emergency services and other road users can use the state highway again.

The gates were fabricated at Underhill Engineering in Plymouth, who make the majority of the company’s large floodgate solutions, and were then shipped to New Zealand before being installed on site in 2018.

Managing director of FCI Tim Collingwood said: ‘A few people have been in touch to inform us of this including our New Zealand agent and one of our employees whose next door neighbour used to live in Tavistock who now cooincidentally happens to live in Paeroa! This is the first time these gates have had to be used to protect against adverse conditions - they had huge floods back in 1980 and put more defences in place following this, which led to us upgrading them in 2018.

‘One of our client’s product managers here used to work for the Environment Agency in the UK and knew of us from his time there - that’s what led them to first get in touch.’

Flood Control International is headquartered in Tavistock and has been designing and supplying floodgates and flood barriers for over twenty years.

Tim said: ‘We ship all over the world; to Africa, Hong Kong, Ireland, Australia, and a lot of different places in the USA - we’ve even sent gates out to a dolphin pool in Dubai. We ship all around the UK too.

‘When it comes to flood protection, there aren’t huge amount of companies globally who can cater for the size and specialist designs of the flood gates we design.

‘Sometimes we can feel as though we’re tucked away with the 25 of us in the team here but it goes to show what an effect we can have all over the world.’