Lone digger begins £5.8m Somerset dredging operation

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  Dredging begins on the River Parrett. It will use £5.8m of the £10m pledged by the Prime Minister PA

Simon de Bruxelles

Published 1 minute ago

A lone digger today began the first dredge of Somerset’s rivers for more than 20 years in an attempt to prevent a repetition of this winter’s devastating floods.

After first laying a wooden track to stop his machine sliding into the murky River Parrett, the operator scraped mud from the river bank and emptied it into a small, tracked dumper truck to be dumped in a field a few hundred years away.