A student from Egremont could be on the verge of changing the face of flood prevention.

Brad Stalker has won the Young Engineer Of Britain Award at Birmingham’s NEC and is now heading of to the USA to spread the word about his invention.

He said: "Eight months ago I entered along with 1,700 other people who applied from around the country.

“Fifteen went through to compete and I came out at the other end and won.

“I’ve won a position to go to Intelisys to present my idea so I’m going to be setting off on Saturday for Phoenix, Arizona.

“You had to fill in a document that stated what your design was, what it does and how it works and everything – you had to go into minute detail about it. It got put through a screening process and if they liked your design they took it.”

Brad says he was well prepared for a high-pressure examination by senior scientists.

“I modelled it, prototyped it and presented it so once you got to the presentation stage you presented your final solution and you were judged by six judges who are all from the National Physics Laboratory.

“Basically it’s a fit-and-forget solution to dredging rivers. You just drop it in the river, walk away and it just dredges it for you and it’s cheap to make.”

Brad’s invention is so innovative it’s being kept under wraps for the time being.

“I can’t say any more about it at the moment because I need to patent it and protect it so nobody steals my idea.

“Some of the designs in the competition are quite innovative so some people do really have to protect their ideas because it’s either building on somebody else’s idea and improving it dramatically or it’s inventing something completely new and both of them can be taken by corporations or somebody else wanting to make a lot of money.”

He says he’s been influenced by the work of a 20th century inventor to try to solve problems faced by his own community in West Cumbria.

“Three years ago I discovered a guy called Viktor Schauberger who was an Austrian naturalist and he inspired me to copy nature. So I copy nature’s principles and I apply them to my designs.

“It’s called biomimicry and I practise this and I applied this to a design and a problem we had, which was the floods crisis, and I thought it needs fixed because people have died. The bridge collapsed in Workington and killed PC Bill Barker and that was tragic and Cockermouth got hit as well.

“It really hit my community and it needed fixed. So I fixed it!”

Send your good luck messages to Brad using social media website Twitter , using #GoodLuckUTCBrad