Taunton Bowls Club trying to raise vital funds for repairs

Taunton Bowls Club, based at Vivary Park, are losing up to £1000 per week due to the flooding of their indoor rink, putting the club at risk of becoming unsustainable.

Due to previous flooding of the premises, they were unable to get flood insurance. They had flood protection systems, such as their door flood defences, which worked, but water ended up coming through the walls and the floor, causing 'severe' damage to their indoor rink.

Dianne Blackmore, Secretary at Taunton Bowling Club, said: "It’s affected us a lot because we haven’t been able to open to members for nearly five weeks, which, because it’s all voluntary and we don’t get any support from anywhere, just membership, we’re losing between £800 to £1000 a week.

"On top of losing that money, we’ve still got all of our utilities to pay, and then we’ve got the extra green expense of trying to get the indoor rink waterproofed so that we can get our members back playing.”

They have set up a Crowdfunder, which will go towards the repairs of the indoor rink.

Dianne explained the club's plans for the repairs.

She said: "What we’re actually trying to do has three phases to it.

"The first phase has got all of the waterproofing inside of the ditches and everything, just to get the green up and running.

"Then, in the summer when it’s drier, we’re going to look to waterproof the walls on the outside where it overlooks into the park.

“And then we might have to go down to the foundations because we’re not sure if the DPC is lower down in the foundation. It depends, we just need to get it open, and it obviously depends on what funds we can get and how much work we can do.”

The club have applied for funding from Taunton Town Council and Sports England, and they are planning social events to raise money for the repairs.

Dianne gave an update on how repairs were going, as well as adding the importance of being able to play the games.

She said: “At the moment, we are cleaning. We’ve just had the rink carpet put back down again, and we are now ‘Rug Doctor’ing it to clean it because of any effluent things where it seeps into the carpet.

"To be honest, we’re really lucky it didn’t damage the whole of the carpet, because if it had, we were looking at £30,000 just for the carpet.

“We’ve had to rearrange some of our friendly games at other clubs because we couldn’t host them, and we don’t want to lose even more money. So we’ve had to use other clubs and pay other clubs to let us play there.”

She added: “A lot of our members are elderly, and it’s a way of them getting out and meeting other people and being close for this length of time, hopefully there won’t be any issues but there’s all the social isolation you get when you can’t get out and you can’t come to the bowls club and enjoy that social interaction, which is what a lot of people do and they’ll have a cup of coffee.

"It just gets them out and gets them talking to people.”