Flooding events are becoming “more and more business as usual” for Renfrewshire Council, a senior officer has revealed in an update on “emergency processes”.

The area endured a weekend washout last month as large parts of west-central Scotland experienced torrential rain in a relatively short period of time, inflicting pressure on the roads and drainage network.

The council’s roads team worked through the night from October 6 to 7 to address issues during the Met Office amber warning, deploying vehicles to pump water and clear priority gullies.

Councillor Iain McMillan, Labour group leader and representative for Johnstone South and Elderslie, asked for a briefing on the adverse weather event at Wednesday’s infrastructure, land and environment policy board.

Referring to a service update report, he said: “I was a bit surprised there was no mention of the recent flooding event that we had in Renfrewshire a few weeks ago.

“It would have been useful to get an update on that – what went wrong, what went right and how we can make things better in the future.

“In my own area, I’m particularly concerned about the continual flooding at Linwood Road end … It would have been good to hear how things are progressing, so maybe that will be in a future report.”

Councillor Michelle Campbell, SNP board convener and representative for Erskine and Inchinnan, responded: “In terms of flooding, as you can appreciate, it’s a bit of a moving feast because we are in that season at the moment.

“I am wanting a bigger update to come to the board in January once we’ve had a bit of through time, so we can have a compare and contrast from that bad weather, anything that’s done to mitigate and see if there’s change after we’ve got more information.”

She then brought in Gerard Hannah, head of climate, public protection and roads, to provide a verbal update on the recent event.

He said almost 24,000 gullies had been cleared by the council this year, which he described as a “phenomenal increase” on past figures.

Mr Hannah explained: “With the recent flooding event, unfortunately, these are now becoming more and more business as usual for our road operations team and the wider teams that support them.

“In terms of planning for these events, we get a notification of a weather event that’s coming our way.

“This particular weather event saw a month’s worth of rainfall in the space of 12 hours.

“It’s very, very challenging in terms of us responding, however, our emergency processes kick in, and we have our day shift and night shift fully activated.

“We are out cleaning gullies, culverts, and priority locations.

“In quite a lot of these circumstances, it is a capacity issue with the combined sewer network and regardless of how many gullies are in the area, the combined sewer network just isn’t going to cope with that volume of rain in such a short period of time.

“For a bit of context in terms of the road operations service and where we are now, up to this point this year we’ve cleaned almost 24,000 gullies, which is a phenomenal increase on where we have been as a service in the past.

“Huge credit to the teams involved in that and getting us as prepared as we possibly can be.”