The bloke with the shovel

[cromwell]

Following on from mine and WM's posts on the Storm Dennis thread.
Last night at the gun club I was talking to a man called Brian. In his working life he was an engineer for the council's Highways Department.
I mentioned the shallow drains WM spoke about in rural areas like the dales and the moors. He said they called them French drains (he didn't know why). Also he said that they were all overgrown now and didn't work because they hadn't been kept up to, and also that when the motorways were built the banks in motorway cuttings usually had these French drains to slow down water running down the cutting side and onto the motorway.
He also told me about "lengths men". These were men employed to clear out ditches and drains in said rural areas, who also made sure grates were clear, etc.
He employed one illiterate man as a lengths man. In order to get their bonus a lengths man had to fill in his work sheet showing the length of ditch he had cleared out. This bloke couldn't do it, though he could count. So Brian told him to count (because he could count) how many shovel lengths on drain he had cleared out, and from that they could work out how many yards / metres he had cleared.
A lengths man would also clear the "grips" which were small drains leading from the edge of the road into the main roadside ditch.
The point being that all of this work using gangs of men ceased around the late 70's.
Now in 2020 we are talking about "rewilding" the hills (I'll believe that when I see it\) in order to slow down the flow of rainwater down the sides of hills and into towns and villages in the valleys.
Why not reinstate the lengths men? Why not get digging those shallow drains again and clearing out the ditches?
Maintenance needs doing and it strikes me that for a very long time now it has been neglected; and this neglect must have had an effect in some of the flood blighted areas.

[Workingman]

A big thank you to Brian for confirming what I knew to be true. The gangs on the hills and dales were not visions of my imagination, they were real: I had seen them.

And here's a coincidence. I mentioned the ditches by the sides of roads and how they were now 'maintained' using a mowing boom to cut the hedges and verges once in a blue moon and the clippings are simply left to rot. Well, there it a T junction near my place that always gets flooded after heavy rain, as it did with Ciara. It is usually driveable if careful, but Ciara put an end to that and it was impassable for days.

The ditch was on the left on the straight up to Bramhope and turned up the T for fifty metres or so, it then started at the other side and went round the corner towards Bramhope. There was a culvert under the road that led to the start of the aptly named Marsh Beck and away. For the last many years the ditch could hardly be seen. If you did not know it was there you would never know.

Guess what? All the vegetation has been trimmed and the clippings removed. The ditch has had the bucket of a digger scraping it out and they closed the road one night to clear the culvert. When big bad Dennis arrived there wasn't even a puddle - things can be done.

[Workingman]

What has really pissed me off about all the floods of the last few years has been the easy option of putting it all down to climate change. Every single TV, radio station, politician and newspaper has blamed it all, everything, on climate change. Well folks, I am a CC believer, but even I am not having it.

In many of the places currently flooded most of the buildings have been there for a hundred years or more, some of them for centuries or more, and they have hardly ever flooded in all that time - if ever. The people did not build them there in order to keep mopping them out every few years. Something else is going on.

Nothing against the Scots, Welsh or N.Irish but I have found some interesting figures for England, because they were easier to get hold of. Since 1776 the wettest year was 1872 followed by 1768 and then 2012 (3rd), The average annual rainfall is 917 mm and although the last few decades have been near or above average they have only raised it by 2 mm above the long-term trend. That is hardly anything of biblical proportions.

Since those times the population has also increased seven fold and most of them have moved from working the land to working in cities. That's not climate change - that's population change. And where we once did the little jobs so that the big ones were not as bad we now do next to nothing and so were get expensive clean ups. That's not climate change - it's stupidity.

[cromwell]

Funny you should say this WM because today there is a piece in the Telegraph clearly implying that the Environment Agency want to do exactly that, just say "Oh dear it's climate change, what can you do eh?" on a large scale.
And the Environment Agency does seem to be the problem. In another article the Telegraph cites the cases of the Lincolnshire Fens which still have some local boards looking after sections of the Fens.
They clear the waterways every year and dredge them every 10-15 years. Their part of the Fens does not flood. The EA look after two local rivers. They do flood!

[Workingman]

My ex's hubby is an urbanised yokel type from Shropshire. At lunchtime he was saying that when he was a lad the weeds, grasses and reeds at the river margins were cut back in late summer to below the waterline to improve autumnal and winter flows. They would grow again in Spring. Only in places where there was a danger of them meeting from bank to bank were they uprooted from the main channel.

That and a bit of dredging is what they did on parts of the Aire and Calder Navigation between Stourton and Allerton the other year... after Leeds City centre flooded. Go figure.

[victor]

The majority of road drains around here are full of leaves never get sucked out ,like they used to be

[cromwell]

In 2014 two rivers in the Somerset levels - the Tone and the Parrett - were dredged over a five mile stretch. So far they haven't flooded since despite all the rain we've had. This happened after locals raised hell about flooding in the levels.

It did however cost £6 million, allegedly. So there's one reason why the Environment Agency don't want to dredge rivers!

[Workingman]

Some old neighbours were moving to York so she could take up a job at St John's University. They had a lovely old place lined up just a few streets away, but when the solicitor hinted that insurance might be hard to find unless they had flood gates fitted the deal fell through - not everyone in the road had them so they would be pointless.

There will now be tens of thousands in the same situation as those owners who cannot sell and whose insurance costs are not far short of their mortgage payments. The house was an old Victorian terrace so had been there a few years and had been dry long before the so-called 'flood defences' on the Foss and Ouse were in place.

They ended up moving way out of town to a 60s box built on what was once good agricultural land.

[Kaz]

Oh what a shame Frank, some of those properties near the river are beautiful old places, but insurance is going to be more and more of an issue. There are some stunning places here, by the Severn - Mick's dad grew up in one, at Sandhurst, but he often needed a boat to get to school in the city

[Workingman]

Kaz, the place they looked at was just off Monkgate / Huntington Road. I actually think it might have been post Victorian, but anyway it was an old terrace and only a few minutes walk through the streets to the Uni. They ended up at Clifton / New Earswick way. Still walkable, but a shoe box by comparison.