W Sanders, of Broadway Avenue, Kingsteignton, writes:

I am saddened to read of the excess water problems these ladies are experiencing at Moorland Reach, Kingsteignton but I’m not surprised. Maps show that attempts to remove clay from this 32-acre site started in the 1800s.

Extraction in those days was by square shafts that went down to a maximum of 100ft. By the early 1900s surface extraction began and it was this method that left Newcross with a nine-acre, 65ft deep lake. This lake became the main focal point to the Newcross Nature Reserve which, in 1953, was in a televised hand-over, given to the village of Kingsteignton by Claude Pike, chairman of WBB.

The area grew in beauty and probably would have remained so if Sibelco had not bought out WBB in the late 1990s. At that time Teignbridge was looking for building land and Sibelco saw an opportunity to get rid of much of the ‘wasteland’ they now owned.

In October 2003 they presented Teignbridge with the idea that room could be found for at least 3,000 homes on the west of Kingsteignton. Newcross was to be the first area they could make available and they proposed the site was suitable for 586 dwellings. At this point in time there were still large areas of natural drainage on the site where surface water soaked into the sand and gravel layers which lay between the clay seams, then continued downward into the Bovey Basin.

However, after seeing the speed and how the site was prepared I and many others predicted there would be future drainage problems.

Even before building started the surface water drainage was so considerable that the planned shallow SuDS (sustainable drainage system) in the south west corner had to be enlarged, deepened and fenced off for safety. Preparing the site involved the removal of huge trees (mainly oak), smaller willows, birch, ash, shrubs and heathland e.g. gorse and heather.

The empty void took hundreds of thousands of tonnes of clay waste. Then bulldozers and compactors were used to reshape the site so the northern end was eight metres higher than the bottom.

During the reshaping unknown tonnes of clay were moved around the site to such a degree I cannot see there would be any natural drainage left. Surplus surface rainwater will run down to the lowest point resulting in people like these ladies having their lives ruined just because of badly prepared ground.

This problem should surely have been sorted long before building started by the installation of land drains. If this had been done everything would be fine now.