A MUCH appreciated emergency group have been out in Cockermouth checking river levels over the past few days to provide residents of the town with reassurance as bad weather starts to hit the county for the first time this year.

The Cockermouth Emergency Responce Group have been out around the town checking rivers and speaking to residents as flood warnings and alerts have been placed on areas of Allerdale and Copeland.

A flood warning was placed on Keswick Campsite yesterday, October 5, as well as flood alerts for the Rivers Cocker, Marron and Derwent.

Cockermouth Emergency Responce Group chairman, Brian Mitchelhill, has been out with colleagues checking river levels and reassuring residents about the safety of their homes.

He said: "Given the bad weather we had at the weekend we knew there was another weather event coming and the rivers were quite high at the weekend so we chose to just keep a watch and brief on the rivers during this event just to basically make sure that they weren't going to cause any flooding issues in the town - and mostly, and predominantly, to reassure people in the town that live in the flood affected areas that we were on the ball, out monitoring the situation and were able to report to them that everything was going to be okay.

"Thats primarily our job. It's to try and provide reassurance in any weather event if it's at all possible/

"Obviously if it's going to flood there's nothing we can do about it, but when there are weather events like this me and my colleagues get out into the town check the river levels and keep an eye as to what the river levels are like."

Despite the warnings and alerts, CERG believe that there is little chance of flooding hitting the town this week, which will come as a solid reassurance to residents.

Speaking on Wednesday, Mr Mitchelhill said: "We are quite confident, we use Met Office data, we use information provided to us directly from the Environment Agency, so we are quite confident today that there won't be any flooding event this week.

"We go out to prevent people worrying about floods, we go out to try and make sure that we have got all the information we can have, do a visible, physical check of the rivers and put those messages on our Facebook page accordingly.

"We have anecdotal evidence from people back to us that they appreciate those messages and it allows them to have a night's sleep when we have these kind of weather events."