VILLAGERS campaigning for action to prevent their main street becoming a sewage-contaminated watercourse again hope to find out what progress has been made next week.

Brawby in Ryedale was cut off for five days in November when sewers backed up following rainfall.

It was the latest in a series of incidents over several years involving sewage flowing out of sewers.

In December, Yorkshire Water gave a public apology to one resident for failing to deal with her complaints over ten years and gave her a high-quality portable toilet to use. She is unable to flush her toilet after rain showers because of sewer drains backing up.

In December, after a public meeting called by the Brawby Parish Meeting, villagers presented Yorkshire Water with their plan to cure the sewage problem for good.

Now they have invited the agency and other organisations to another public meeting on Tuesday to discuss what has been done since that meeting.

A spokesman for Yorkshire Water said it would send a representative to the meeting.

“We absolutely are progressing with our investigation and will have feedback for them. They deserve a full and thorough investigation and that is what we want to give them,” he said.

“It is good news from our point of view.”

He said the authority with overall responsibility in matters of flooding caused by surface water is North Yorkshire County Council.

A spokesman for the county council said: “We are not attending this meeting because the issue is largely between the parish and Yorkshire Water at this stage.”

The role of the county council was to act as a co-ordinating body, rather than to carry out physical operations.

Ryedale District Council’s environmental health department will be attending and the Environmental Agency, which deals with river-related flooding has also been invited.

The meeting will be held at Brawby village hall on Tuesday, at 7.30pm.

Meanwhile, Lisa Browne, who runs Linton Stores with her husband Clive, says it has lost more than £3,000 of trade a week since a road between Linton-on-Ouse and Newton-on-Ouse shut last September, after being damaged by flooding from the River Ouse, because some customers faced a ten-mile detour to get there.

She also had to drive each day at 6.30am to the collapsed road, where she handed over the daily papers, including The Press, to a paper boy and paper girl who had cycled from Newton-on-Ouse, and then took them back to deliver them in their village.

She said North Yorkshire County Council had emailed to say it hoped to reopen the road as a one-way contraflow controlled by traffic lights from January 21, weather permitting.

In Ryedale, the multi-agency “Silver Command”, set up to deal with flooding problems, has been stepped down after river and groundwater levels continued to fall in recent days.