South Dublin County Council has commissioned engineering consultants to carry out a detailed study of the floods which last week deluged Lucan village and a number of new housing estates in the area.
Apart from the village itself, housing estates in the Hayden's Lane area were inundated when the Griffeen River - a tributary of the Liffey - burst its banks last Sunday night. Dozens of new houses were flooded to a depth of three or four feet.
On the recently-built Grange Manor estate, where houses were sold for up to u£209,000 and, in some cases, only occupied a few days earlier, gardai had to borrow a boat to rescue families with young children in deep and dangerous water.
The developers, Castlethorn Construction Ltd, who are among the largest housebuilders in the Dublin area, did not return calls on whether they were aware that the land in this part of Lucan was prone to flooding.
Castlethorn, which is run by builder Mr Joe O'Reilly, has planning permission for a total of 767 houses in the area, part of a parcel of 500 acres in south Lucan rezoned for residential development in 1998 in the South Dublin county plan.
Mr Sean Murray, senior engineer for water and drainage services with South Dublin County Council, said Castlethorn had "proposed attenuation measures to deal with floods, but it would appear that they have proven to be inadequate".
Though the Hayden's Lane area had suffered flooding in the past, Mr Murray said that what happened last week was "a very serious flood event", with rainfall equivalent to 10 per cent of the annual average in the time-span of just 24 hours.
This caused the Griffeen River, normally a pleasant feature of the linear park which bears its name, to burst its banks, sending a torrent of water down Adamstown Road into Lucan village and flooding new housing estates off Hayden's Lane.
"We are taking this extremely seriously," he said. "Last Monday, our engineers were out there measuring water levels and gathering other data for a detailed study of the mechanics of the flood with a view to determining how and why it happened."
Consultant engineers were called in on Tuesday to co-ordinate the study, but it would be "a number of weeks before we have preliminary results", Mr Murray said. "We want to get on top of this because we obviously don't want it to happen again."
Mr Murry explained that whenever the council facilitated the development of new housing in the potential flood plain of rivers or streams, there was a general requirement that measures had to be taken by the developers "to limit the run-off to pre-development levels".
He also pointed out that there had been no serious flooding in the Clondalkin area last week, and he attributed this to relief works carried out by the council to create new "flood routes" for the River Camac, since it burst its banks in 1993.
Meanwhile, Iarnrod Eireann is collaborating with the Office of Public Works drainage division to relieve flooding at Hazelhatch, in north Kildare, where the Sherkin River - which runs underneath the railway line - flooded last Monday, paralysing rail services.
A spokesman for the Minister for Public Enterprise, Ms O'Rourke, who visited the scene on Wednesday, said there had been a serious flooding problem in the area for a number of years and a report suggesting remedial measures was now under consideration.
