RESIDENTS in a market town hit by several devastating floods are celebrating after an innovative £2m project to cut the risk of deluges was completed.

Householders and traders in Pickering said the Slow The Flow scheme, which has involved a decade-long battle to secure funding, would give them peace of mind that they would have up to 18 hours to secure their properties and possessions following torrential downpours on the North York Moors.

The Environment Agency is putting finishing touches to a flood storage area - which can hold 120,000 cubic metres of water at times of peak flow - in Newtondale, upstream of Pickering, which is the final piece in a range of measures, including moorland restoration and drain blocking, to delay flood waters rushing into the town.

Other key features of the scheme, which has been supported by Durham, Newcastle and Oxford universities, include an array of small debris dams built in becks and stream and the establishment of no-burn buffer zones.

Major deluges have been recorded in Pickering in 1979, 1999, 2002, 2007 and 2012, as Pickering Beck flows through a steep sided valley, funnelling water from the hills towards the town.

In 2008, campaigners, including 90-year-old resident Topsy Clinch, set up a living room in the beck and took a petition to Downing Street, after flood waters inundated 85 properties and the A170, causing £7m of damage.

Work on the reservoir was launched in January last year, more than two years after another scheme was abandoned as costs spiralled to £3.2m.

Pickering Civic Society chairman Mike Potter said campaigners' perseverance and funding from Ryedale and North Yorkshire councils had seen the risk of flooding in the town in any one year being reduced from 25 per cent to four per cent.

He said he believed Mrs Clinch, who died in 2009, would have been delighted to see the scheme completed.

Mr Potter: "It's been an awful long slog, but it's very satisfying seeing it coming to a conclusion."

He said hoped cost-effective measures, such as small dams, would be replicated in other rural towns where flood prevention schemes were not considered cost-effective by the Government.

Pickering councillor John Clark said the scheme had been worth waiting for as it was a vast improvement on a previous proposal involving a series of a concrete walls.

Cllr Clark added: "Flooding is too big an issue for an area like Ryedale to pay for and must in future be paid for by central government, as happened in Somerset."