Floods!

[Workingman]

Remember them?

When they were newsworthy I read many posts on media sites from ordinary people saying that rivers should be cleared, dredged, cleaned up and allowed to flow. Nobody claimed that the methods were a cure, but that they would help the situation for virtually nothing compared with hemming the rivers in with walls and levees and moving the problem to somewhere else.

The government and Environment Agency were adamant, though: build, spend £hundreds of millions every year, put cities on stilts...... The thinking appears to be that things have to be visible for miles so that claims of being seen to be doing something can be made.

Turn to the Chartered Institution of Water and Environmental Management (CIWEM) - people who might know something about water flows - and they are with the ordinary people. They are talking of returning to the work of the now defunct Regional Water Authorities and the National River Authority to create upland floods, to stop the water from getting to the middle and lower levels, and of keeping the other levels clear to allow them to flow. More power to them, they want to work with nature rather than hem it in.

As a young lad I used to do a lot of walking in the Pennines and the Dales and there were times when areas in the woods and moors were nothing but bogs, but they served a purpose. A simple sluice, not much more than board in a break in the bank, would allow water to drain into a clean ditch. The ditch would eventually split into more ditches and they would get shallower and until they eventually disappeared. I can also remember teams thinning out reed beds in the slower reaches of the river Aire to keep it flowing.

[Kaz]

Remember them?? It never seems to be dry for long around here

They really should dredge and use those other methods you mention, but it seems to be very much neglected these days, and home and business owners are paying the price

[KateLMead]

Terrible the lack of support for homes the floods have destroyed. As for Increasing MP's salaries, the chancer's are already overpaid.
Millions given in aid to despots, there is an old saying Charity Begins At Home

[Workingman]

£400m extra!

That is what the LGA is asking for to help with the repair bill for damage caused by storms and flooding. It comes on top of the £600 (approx) annually spent on flood defences - building, maintenance and repair. It is only the first request, there will be others.

Seems to me that something might not be working as planned.

[cromwell]

On BBC breakfast t'other day they featured some place where the road had been blocked by a landslip. We we then told that Godalming council, trying to prevent this happening again had already cut down 700 trees. What?
Surely cutting trees down increases the chances of a landslip, not prevents it?
As to floods I had to smile when on old chap asked why no one was dredging the rivers any more? To which the environment people said it was ineffective and expensive.
More people means more houses mean more building on flood plains.
Local councils would rather spend money on flashy projects like an art gallery than pay blokes to clean the drains.

[Kaz]

Dredging does work! What idiots these people are! As to removing trees to prevent a landslip or slide - that just defies belief

[lissie]

I don`t think it is helped by all these people paving over their lawns
The rain had somewhere to go when most houses had lawns.

lissie

[Workingman]

Lissie, that is one of many straws all breaking the camel's back, and they all have to be seen as small parts of the bigger problem.

Unfortunately the Environment Agency only sees the big picture, and big (expensive) solutions appear to be the only ones they are interested in. Well, those and stupid ones, like cutting down trees to prevent landslides.

[Diflower]

The town where I grew up was on the River Wey; there was a huge area called the Water Meadows, we would go on walks from infants and junior schools, looking at ponds/plants/frog spawn, etc., and along the actual river would go with our little nets to catch sticklebacks.

A few years ago, when Bb and I were driving up to see Dad and s/m, I couldn't believe my eyes, they were building houses on the Water Meadows
No prizes for guessing how they're doing then

In some areas it's been unavoidable; on Tv today they were showing areas on the Norfolk coast where the sea has broken through into freshwater lagoons, which is what we have here down on the marshes.
Harsh as it is, this is just as nature happens. It's disastrous for all sorts of animal species, they live/depend on the freshwater lagoons close to the sea, and the seawater invading them has killed their food sources (so pretty disastrous for them too).
The weather, the tides have made this Island and many others as they are, it's not always something you can fight against.

[Workingman]

Harsh as it is, this is just as nature happens.

Couldn't have put it better.

And for generations we have been working with nature to mitigate what it can throw at us: until now. Now we are fighting against it, because we think that we can. The old ways might not have been perfect, but they worked to help protect the most vulnerable areas.

I am not sure whether we are the most clever stupid animals or the most stupid clever animals ever to have walked the earth.