Jul 23 2007
What should the Environment Agency do with too much rainwater?
When rivers swell following a period of very heavy rain there are three courses of action open to the Environment Agency which has the duty of water management.
??The first is to let nature take its course. The excess water is then deposited on towns, villages and fields depending on the lie of the land and the height of the river banks from hills to sea.
The second is to build up the banks, permanently or temporarily, in built up areas so the water is deposited over farmland and fields instead of in built up areas. This should be combined with compensation for crops destroyed - cheaper than repairing damaged buildings.
The third is to divert water onto fields from??swollen rivers above towns and villages where otherwise it would burst the river bank and cause flooding.
People expect the Agency to combine methods 2 and 3. Instead the Agency gives the impression of helplessness. Its public statements combine complacency - we did warn you, we will go on warning you so we did our job??- with fatalism - this is a once in 200 year event, you cannot expect to stay dry because we??have not been spending enough money.
There was plenty of warning of a wet summer from the Met Office. The very heavy rains of last friday were predicted.
Why was more not done to put in place temporary flood barriers at the weakest points?
Why did Mr Miliband do so little as Environment Secretary to prepare us for this? He was very keen to lecture us on climate change, and several of us kept saying the House of Commons we needed to plan for both water shortage and water excess.
What is the government going to do for the future to stop this happening again?
Will the government and Environment Agency make a statement about where they do have in place the necessary measures to divert or contain water in built up areas, and which other towns prone to flooding will be given such protection next?
Will they accept that these floods are not a once in 200 year event - many of these areas have been flooded much more recently than 1807, and most were flooded in 1947.
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John Redwood has been the Member of Parliament for Wokingham since 1987. First attending Kent College, Canterbury, he graduated from Magdalen College...
John,
There are other measures that should be undertaken, particularly maintain drains properly, I can’t remember the last time I saw a drain being cleaned. Secondly keep rivers dredged properly to maximise water flow. Thirdly store temporary flood defences close to where they will be used rather than miles away.
While the emergency services have been, as ever, exceptional the Department of the Environment is a joke.
Yours from Upton in Severn
‘He was very keen to lecture us on climate change…’
That’s exactly it, professional policy wonks like Miliband get bored with bread and butter stuff like flood defences, instead they want to dream up madcap schemes for ‘tradable personal carbon credits’ and the like that will not make the slightest bit of difference to the weather.
Another trick is to pay the local farmers to use tractors and trailers as rescue vehicles, instead of calling out the RAF to do the same job much more slowly and more expensively.
Tractors are very tall machines, and it takes much more than two or three feet of water to stall one. Farm flatbed trailers are similarly far off the ground, and whilst it may be much less glamorous to get a ride on the local farmer’s haycart, there’re an awful lot more farm tractors than RAF seakings.