UKC

Behaving like kids. Each trying to shift elsewhere the blame for the debacle following the flooding instead of getting something positive done. All we seem to hear is that Cameron has chaired another COBRA meeting, Smith says what a great job he is doing and Pickles saying one thing to Andrew Marr and something different in Parlaiment. Nobody in authority seems particularly bothered about the real problems.

In reply to FesteringSore:

The real problem being that it's raining a lot?

In reply to Rob Exile Ward: Yes. And it's disgusting that nothing's being done about it.

In reply to Sir Chasm:

And it's very windy, though on reflection, I think Pickles may be contributing to that

In reply to Sir Chasm:

I blame all those immigrants. Coming over here and bringing wet weather with them. Never used to have it.

In reply to FesteringSore:

Somerset Floods, pretty much left to it, but does get a Pointless visit From jug ears.

Thames Valley gets extra inch of water and its all systems go, Funny that aint it?

In reply to FesteringSore:

Joking aside, we have known for a long time that this was going to happen - global warming, rising sea levels, unpredictable weather - but in true British fashion we've been looking around for someone to blame instead of getting on with dealing with the real problem. It's going to keep happening, and the chances are it will keep getting worse. All our major cities are built on rivers (for a reason) and since this is where the population density is it might very quickly reach epic proportions. And forget the dredging - that simply shifts the flooding, it doesn't change it. And forget looking to politicians for solutions, too: very few of them think beyond the next election, and they don't have an ideal-world budget, either. This is a long-term problem that we need to address for ourselves. Better start thinking about where you live, in terms of future flooding, and what you need to do to protect yourselves and your families.

In reply to FrogOnTheTyne:

Difficult to compare (UK press only talks about England, French press only about France), but much of NW France is also very badly flooded due to the same heavy rain, high tides etc. But no one here in France is blaming anyone - its accepted that its the weather

In reply to FesteringSore:

It's a crap situation and I can't imagine how upsetting it is to have your house flooded and knowing it is going to happen again (not to mention the dip in house price)

But the fact remains that the flooded areas are built on areas which are prone to flooding. Short of building a Mississippi style leve not much is going to alleviate the situation short of the politicians further bankrupting the country to pay for such an expensive scheme or doing a sun dance.

The situation is f'@ck3d. Just as a thought game, what would the locals being flooded say to having whopping great big leves in their back garden or to take it a step further (if global warming is a cause) - windfarms or nuclear plant and other low carbon means of producing energy.

In reply to FesteringSore:


At long last someone who believes that they know what "the real problems" are

I hope you're going to share your knowledge!

In reply to Choss:


Leaving aside I think its a tad more than an extra inch of water and the resources being thrown at Somerset.
Do you think that the fact a few more people might be affected in the Thames valley area might have something to do with it?

In reply to Choss:


Do you really believe that Cameron et al would be doing anything other than sitting on their a**ses if the Prince of Wales had not taken the initiative. Whatever you might think about him, his visit to Somerset did far more to boost morale than any politicians had or are ever likely to. He phoned Cameron after visiting and I believe it was this as much as anything that precipitated Cameron's visit.

As for Smith's latest about the people affected only having themselves to blame, it just defies belief that anyone in his position could make such crass statements. The man is mental. As for building on flood plains, I am not aware that the government of which Smith was a member did anything to stop such moves/

In reply to FesteringSore:



Why? Isn't it rather obvious that if you live on a flood plain you will get wet sometimes? (There is a clue in the name).

In reply to FesteringSore:

The impression I had was that somerset was actually coming off far better than most flooded areas in this, at least in terms of coverage/focus, although perhaps not in terms of things actually being done. Apparently, of 5000 homes flooded in the UK in January, only 60 - just over 1% - were in the Somerset levels.

In reply to Si dH:

There is an interesting article in this week's New Civil Engineer about this, with a plea for ministers to start listening to engineers instead of politicians.

In reply to MG:


So, all the houses built on flood plains should perhaps be left empty. Government and the EA allowed and encouraged houses to be built on flood plains and then presumably expected people to live in them.

In reply to FesteringSore:

Not necessarily, there just needs to be an expectation that occasionally they will flood. Do the EA have any input into planning where houses go?

In reply to Si dH:


Exactly. I don't think anything has really gone wrong - farmland flooding is what is intended during extreme floods. That few houses are affected is a success, I would say.

In reply to FesteringSore:

Aye, but we all need to start thinking for ourselves man, instead of expecting politicians to do it for us. Shit creek, no paddle, better find somewhere safe to land and start swimming. And teach your children how to think while you're at it, because that's not top of the current curriculum either.

In reply to MG:


So you are happy for crops to be destroyed, livestock lost and farmers' livelihoods ruined with the resultant impact on consumers.

In reply to FesteringSore:


Given the alternative (many million/billions being spent on flood defences that are rarely if ever used), yes.

In reply to FesteringSore:


Crap. In medieval times they went out of their way to flood their meadows to increase the fertility of the soil. It's a question of land management - it's that thinking thing again. We need to stop knee-jerking and start looking ahead.

In reply to FesteringSore:


So what do you want them to do?

In reply to FesteringSore:


Philip Hammond, Defence Secretary and MP for Runymede, currently being flooded, was on the radio this morning. He was asked about building on floodplains, and his reply was along the lines that there are lovely hills in Surrey and no-one would dream of building on them. Perhaps they should. Perhaps these are the kind of decisions which need to be taken, particularly when we know that extreme weather events will become more likely, and when Governments of all shades have to prioritise spending. Flood prevention doesn't come cheap, but one obvious initiative would be to reduce the use of flood-prone areas for housing. It's not exactly rocket science.

In reply to MG:


And yet we pour billions into countries such as India and China, two of the biggest economies in the world. I'm sorry but to my simple mind that does not make sense.

In reply to FesteringSore:


Minor point of information, but no overseas aid goes to China, and India doesn't get billions.

In reply to FesteringSore:


Well if you mean international aid, we don't - £27m to China in 2012 and probably zero pretty soon; £292m to India. Given that India is among the world's poorer countries with many people without basics like clean water or sufficient food, is it so unreasonable spending money there rather than ensuring 60 houses in Somerset aren't flooded every so often?

In reply to MG:

Yes they do, and it's harder to build in such areas than it used to be, It's even quite hard to build livestock fences in the flood plain these days, because they collect debris and prevent the flow of water.A lot of properties being flooded are relatively old- built under different regimes.

But the planning issues around flooding are wider, for example there is a lot of lobbying by government for deregulation of planning and development (Bonfire of the Quangoes?) which can lead to poor management of runnoff from new build - this doesn't affect flooding of the development, but can lead to issues arising downstream. Then there's the increase in sewage and grey water getting channeled into inadequate sewers, which immediately overflow in extreme rainfall, compounding the misery of flooded property with raw sewage.

And there's more than one kind of flooding. Coastal flooding is different to flash flooding is different to river flooding, all need different management. A couple of people here have mentioned Cockermouth -this is a very different catchment to the Levels and subsequent flood alleviation works there wouldn't help if they were done on the Parrett, which is again very different to the Thames (which is even different to the Severn at Worcester!).

Because it is an infrequent event (ho. ho.) flood defence is an easy budget to cut. Unreasonable EA bureaucrats getting in the way of dynamic entrepreneurs are a soft target. Complaints about ugly flood defences blocking the view can slow or stop measures that will stop that view coming in through the patio window.

And until the rivers start to rise, no one is that bothered. Hand on heart, how many people here knew anything about dredging, pumping and flood storage on the Somerset levels? Or a better analogy. How many climbers know what steps have been taken (if any) to prevent another closure of the countryside due to a foot and mouth outbreak? yet that was only 12 years ago

In reply to FesteringSore:


This entire statement is incorrect.

It makes very good sense to invest in certain foreign countries. China is investing huge amounts in to parts of Africa in the hope for economic and mineral returns in the future, but this is a separate issue to be discussed else where.

In reply to FesteringSore:
Another way to look at the building on flood plains is... why do we have to do it??

In the old days it was simple, flood plains meant fertile soil.

Nowadays we build on them purely to house an ever growing population (which we need in order to fund the next generation). The whole problem is FUBAR and so incredibly complex and intricate it is hardly worth debating as we have no control over it anymore.

In reply to toad:
how many people here knew anything about dredging, pumping and flood storage on the Somerset levels?

I can go better than that. I had never heard of the levels!

In reply to FesteringSore:

Agriculture changes all the time for all sorts of reasons. It may be that in some areas winter sown crops are no longer practicable. When I was a kid oil seed rape was a novelty, Biomass crops were unheard of. Livestock have been lost for all sorts of economic reasons, even without the TB controversies, dairy has been dying on its arse for years, with the associated loss of livestock.

Land that used to be arable is now grass, land that used to be grass goes to annual cultivation. If you filter out the very effective and bluntly rather whiny voice of the NFU/CLA, Agriculture is suprisingly resilient.

In reply to cap'nChino:


I kind of agree with you. In this and many other areas of modern life the time for talking has gone. It's time to start acting for ourselves. I don't mean anarchy, I mean looking out for ourselves and the people we care about. Hard times are coming and the old 'bread and circuses' thing has never been more relevant since Juvenal mentioned it in Roman times. Thanks to our wonderful social media stuff we've all taken our eye off the ball and it's about to knock us out unless we shape up and get out of its path.

In reply to Rob Exile Ward:


Hang on Rob - you can't go on bringing "common sense" and the "blindingly obvious" to the table. This is the fault an individual and when we figure out who that person is, we will blame them. We can then feel better about the decisions we made to live on a flood plain.

In reply to toad:



The resilience that we are seeing today is largely being achieved by ever bigger units chasing economies of scale. That's all well and good until people start noticing mega-dairies etc and realise that they don't want one on their doorstep.

It's easy to dismiss the concerns of an industry as "whiny" but that ignores the bigger picture and the real questions that we need to be find the answers for.

In reply to timjones:



Economist Fritz Schumacher was talking about all this in "Small is Beautiful" back in 1973 and here we are still debating the same issues 40 years later as though we had all the time in the world to get it right without having to make any individual sacrifices ourselves. If people had listened to what Schumacher was saying then we wouldn't be in this (ahem) Pickle now.

In reply to FrogOnTheTyne:


In English?
jk

In reply to jkarran:

"Already long ago, from when we sold our vote to no man, the People have abdicated our duties; for the People who once upon a time handed out military command, high civil office, legions — everything, now restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things: bread and circuses."

Juvenal circa AD 100

“If greed were not the master of modern man--ably assisted by envy--how could it be that the frenzy of economism does not abate as higher "standards of living" are attained, and that it is precisely the richest societies which pursue their economic advantage with the greatest ruthlessness? How could we explain the almost universal refusal on the part of the rulers of the rich societies--where organized along private enterprise or collective enterprise lines--to work towards the humanisation of work? It is only necessary to assert that something would reduce the "standard of living" and every debate is instantly closed. That soul-destroying, meaningless, mechanical, monotonous, moronic work is an insult to human nature which must necessarily and inevitably produce either escapism or aggression, and that no amount of of "bread and circuses" can compensate for the damage done--these are facts which are neither denied nor acknowledged but are met with an unbreakable conspiracy of silence--because to deny them would be too obviously absurd and to acknowledge them would condemn the central preoccupation of modern society as a crime against humanity.”

E F Schumacher 1973

In reply to jkarran:

What I'm saying is that we've abdicated all responsibility for making our own decisions in favour of expecting our politicians to think for us and we've lost sight of the bigger picture completely. Our collective need for instant gratification has blinded us to the much more urgent need to take collective responsibility for what we're doing to our future (and more critically, our children's future). We need to take responsibility for ourselves and not sit around whining about how we're being let down by the people we voted for (or didn't, as the case may be).

In reply to FesteringSore:

That young Chris Smith fellow has mostly been eating yoghurt fellow off of the Fast Show, you know the one I mean.

In reply to FesteringSore:

How difficult is it to build houses on flood plains on stilts? I have clients who put their supermarkets on stilts quite a lot so that cars can park under them, and another client whose house was flooded and did precisely this with a rebuild/extension. Is it just an engineering impossibility in general?

jcm

In reply to Papillon:
>> So you are happy for crops to be destroyed, livestock lost and farmers' livelihoods ruined with the resultant impact on consumers.

Start filing criminal charges against farmers for animal welfare violations for keeping livestock in enclosed fields that are liable to flood?

Make having a risk assessment and mitigating procedures in place for when the inevitable happens a pre-condition of being allowed to keep livestock?

Suck it up and accept that everyone has either explicitly or implicitly decided to ride out the effects of occasional extreme weather as it is perceived to be cheaper and less destructive than giant engineering works to mitigate it?

My personal take is that farmers should bare the costs of either letting arable land flood or building engineering works to defend it, and that the army should have been brought in much sooner to assist with either evacuation or stress free euthanasia of livestock before they drowned due to negligence against well forecasted and predicted floods.

If accepting the cost of flooding is going to bankrupt farmers then there needs to be a rational discussion about why this is, and if it is in the national interest to intervene. I would rather see the intervention being to raise the price of food to a sustainable level, but another fair alternative would be for a state run arable flood insurance scheme that recognises the roll arable land provides in mediating exceptional flooding in urban areas and compensates farmers accordingly.

In reply to johncoxmysteriously: It's not difficult, but it is expensive (compared to building on stilts, not being flooded out). Tricky to do in the time between a flood warning being issued and getting your feet wet though, builders are so slow.

In reply to wintertree: Thanks, I was hoping Festering Sore would come up with something (other than 'dredging').

In reply to Sir Chasm:

Yes, I realise that once the houses have been built without it's a bit late. But rather than abandon building in these areas, wouldn't it make more sense to put new buildings in them on stilts if it were possible? Is that really more expensive than the sort of flood defences which would be needed to stop this sort of thing and/or building houses which become swimming pools once every few years?

As someone said, we're going to get more of this sort of thing rather than less. Getting an Environment Secretary who isn't a climate change denier would be a good start.

jcm

In reply to wintertree:


Compulsory swimming lessons for cows on the Levels?

jcm

In reply to johncoxmysteriously:

Why stop there? Why not an education secretary who believes in teachers, a health secretary who believes in the NHS, (and evidenced based medicine), and a local authority secretary who believes in local authorities...

In reply to FesteringSore:

Just so we are all on the same page, what do you think the real problems are?

In reply to Rob Exile Ward:


Oh, come on, man. This is madness.

For a start, where are you going to find any of those in the Tory party?

jcm

In reply to johncoxmysteriously: I don't know how the costs would compare, but householders would pay for stilts directly whereas the cost of flood defences is shared out amongst many. Unless you're talking about the government building council housing, ho ho, on stilts.

In reply to Sir Chasm:

You could just issue planning guidance that houses shouldn’t be built in certain areas except on stilts, couldn’t you?

I don’t know anything about it, obviously, but as I say a couple of my clients didn’t seem to think much of it.

Still a bore having to commute to work by kayak, obviously, but at least you don’t have to wear a wetsuit for dinner.

jcm

In reply to Rob Exile Ward:


Wo wo wo.. ..that sounds a bit controversial!

In reply to johncoxmysteriously: Of course, but the cost is still there. Speaking for myself, obviously, I wouldn't buy an expensive house on stilts on a flood plain any more than I would buy a cheaper house not on stilts on a flood plain.

In reply to johncoxmysteriously:


Cows can be taught to swim, but they'd need clearance over fences/hedges and somewhere to swim to.

More serious suggestions might involve raised refuge areas in a sparse subset of fields or evacuation plans with worked out timings and destinations based on herd sizes. If my business was on reclaimed land I would sure as s--tcakes have such plans for my assets and make sure they were kept current.

In reply to wintertree:

Do you need to teach them? The drovers used to swim cows over to Skye, didn't they? I thought cows were just quite good swimmers by nature.

jcm

In reply to FesteringSore:
Caroline Spelman was secretary of state for environment (DEFRA) 2010 to 2012. To ingratiate herself to her masters she volunteered to accept massive cuts to her departments budget, in fact more than any other department. The Enviroment Agency has never recovered from that. Spelman was the one who tried to sell off all the Forestry Commission forests, but public outcry foiled her. There has been over five hundred redundancies in the EA because of her, experienced people who we now need badly.

In reply to johncoxmysteriously:


I think the problem was that they are better swimmers than navigators, so the drover swims with them. Not much help if you're penned into a shed or a field mind. I don't know how much better swimmers they are in sea water vs fresh water either.

In reply to mockerkin:

Yes! I may have said this at some point, but Spellman really does have a role in all this. Overeager attempt by a new and inexperienced minister to ingratiate herself with a new and inexperienced government. And yes, those redundancies of experienced people were the real face of the whole "cutting back office inefficiency" narrative

In reply to wintertree:

>so the drover swims with them

Did he? Blimey. In a boat, you mean, or not?

There's a lot I don't know about droving. I was walking in the eastern Highlands this summer and following a lot of drove roads, and I made a mental vow to obtain some book on the subject, but I haven't done it yet. Didn't think it would take a thread about flooding to remind me, but there we are.

jcm

In reply to johncoxmysteriously:


No, he used to do the half mile open water swim to which ever Scottish island it was with them in his boxers. He said he switched to a boat once he hit his 60s.

In reply to johncoxmysteriously:


The classic work on the subject is 'The Drove Roads of Scotland' by A.R.B. Haldane.
See also the info in my notes to this photo from Mull - it amazed me when I read about it:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/douglas_griffin/8161783545/

The purpose of my OP was to point out that the people at the top seem to be doing little else but posturing, mud slinging(no pun intended), trying to put the blame for the apparent lack of co-ordination and effort on to somebody else, willy waving, trying to score political points and make sure they are photographed ankle deep in water wearing wellies. I had not intended it to devolve into a discussion as to what could or should have been done.

In reply to wintertree:


http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-highlands-islands-12430571

In reply to Douglas Griffin:

Fantastic review of that on Amazon from the bloke who bought it thinking it was a walking guide. You can see why he might have been disappointed.

jcm

In reply to FesteringSore:
On one level, Dave and pals went to prep schools that didnt cover the fact that water flows downhill.

In the bigger picture, the coastline, inland waterways and vegetation of England has been extensively modified over the centuries but without the technical competence of the Dutch.

The true value of tens of thousands of houses in southern England is now about a fiver but The Great Fantasy will no doubt continue and poor souls on £12k pa will be paying some tax to prop up the property fantasies of dumb bar stewards on ten times that income.

Cheaper to bulldoze the lot and build new in a sensible place than try to support all this stupidity.

In reply to Jim Fraser:



Like the "dredge, dredge, dredge" mantra that has slipped into the popular press, I am getting equally tired of the "oh why can't we be like the Dutch" which is also a tabloid favourite. We ARE like the Dutch. We swap engineers and techniques with the Dutch all the time. The Dutch did a lot of our (very) early land reclamation (Vermuden) and we are still trying to fix it 200 years later. Holland is a different country, with much less coastline and different problems and priorities. Their river systems are also largely controlled by other countries, but hey no lets all ogle the Dutch.
>

In reply to johncoxmysteriously:


But why? When the climate cooled at the end of the Bronze Age, people moved down from the high ground. Now the climate is warming up again, why not move back up there?

There are lots of reasons why not of course; but none of them make sense. We have just got too safe, too settled, too complacent and too dependant on someone else to do the thinking for us, so we can blame them when things go wrong. Why should we make any changes to our comfortable existence when it's someone else's fault?

In reply to johncoxmysteriously:


Some developers keep putting forward plans to build on the water meadows just outside Colchester. Which as the name subtly hints at can get rather wet.
So far havent got anywhere but they keep trying. Dont think any proposals for stilts yet though. Think partially due to the fact most people wouldnt be too happy about moving the car for a couple of months of a year to a carpark half a mile away and kayaking back and forth.

In reply to toad:


Good point. Different problems and priorities. And they seem to have assessed those different problems and priorities correctly and arrived at solutions they can handle and, more than the Brits, have accepted the risks.

Although Somerset, Norfolk and Lincolnshire may provide some of the best examples of King Canute standards of water management, there is an excellent example of poor and ridiculous planning on my doorstep.

Here in Inverness, around 50000 people live on a pile of gravel over 250m deep at the end of a glaciated fault and overlooked both east and west by high ground at 200 to 300m.

The high ground was never going to help, but you still have to do a long list of really stupid things to flood a town built of a huge pile of gravel. Against all the odds, we have managed it. All the usual bad stuff like development encroaching on water-courses, replacing trees and farmland with roads and patios, careless and half-baked land reclamation, and simple greed, are part of the picture. £30M is being spent on stupid schemes that I fully expect, a decade from now, will have been shown to make things worse.

£30M around here will buy a couple of hundred new homes of mixed sizes to modern standards of sustainability. That's where the money should be going and the flood risk areas should be parkland.

Not for the first time, the lack of value given to intelligence, knowledge and skill, combined with imbecilic passion for development opportunities holds back the UK economy and erodes the happiness of its people.

In reply to FesteringSore:

A tangent but I've been thinking of a list of things which should not be left to governments to ahem 'govern' as they need to be allowed to benefit from strategies that plan ahead in decades, not subjected to a continual revolving door of short term policies born from political opportunism. In no particular order and off of the top of my head:

Education
Forestry, ok lets make that DEFRA
The NHS
Transport infrastructure
Energy

Any more?

"It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried".

In reply to Bobling:

Can't contribute anything here. Frogs only do water. Justice? The welfare of those unable to look after themselves but with no family to look out for them? (I hesitate to mention social services, benefits or community affairs but it is a fact that any civilised society will take care of its genuinely vulnerable people.)

It sounds like a good idea for a new thread maybe. But perhaps UKC isn't the right pond for real deep thinking?

In reply to FrogOnTheTyne:

Gribbet.

In reply to Rob Exile Ward:

Oi! Don't use that kind of language here