[Closed] This flooding thing...

It's not that simple but partly, yes, newer houses have been built on land previously left alone (and that was cheap, and available)..

House in "Water Meadow Close" ? no thanks...

by that raionale i suppose we should just abandon all of the fens?

by that raionale i suppose we should just abandon all of the fens?

No complaints there.

Yours,

A Fen Tiger.

You could argue the same about spending taxes on cancer treatment for smokers or A&E for MTBers who crash and hurt themselves...

Society is about spreading risk and give and take....

Although I'm all for re-flooding the fens as long as they fence it off first so no one can escape before hand...

At least let us shoot the surveyors who signed off on the purchases.

At least let us shoot the surveyors who signed off on the purchases.

Or the councillors who approved it as part of the local development plan....

At least let us shoot the surveyors who signed off on the purchases.

Or the councillors who approved it as part of the local development plan....

Or the financiers who funded and ensured the profitability of such development

No complaints there.

Yours,

A Fen Tiger.

I didn't have you down as a fen dweller?

I didn't have you down as a fen dweller?

He was cast out when the locals declared his Photoshop skills 'witchcraft'.

eddiebaby - Member
At least let us shoot the [s]surveyors who signed off on the purchases[/s] planning officers who permitted the developments.

Amended for you.

I'm not sure what to make of the whole 'if the rivers were dredged it'd be fine/we haven't had flooding like this in living memory' thing. With the amount of rainfall over the past two years (not just January) water levels have been incredibly high, so I'm not entirely convinced dredging would have made a difference, at the end of the day extreme weather events are called so because they don;t happen very often, and when they do the results are bad.

In terms of development it's a case of risk versus cost and demand. You can design a structure to withstand just about anything, but it will be uneconomic, getting the balance right is the tricky part.

planning officers advise. councillors are the ones that can overturn and vote to proceed (depending on external influences, their collective wisdom, &c).

Was the flood plain there before you bought a house?

If the answer is yes, then I have very little sympathy, it's why I bought a house on a hill. (In a historical coal mining area - if it falls into a sink hole that's my problem, as should their soggy carpets be)

I bought a house on a hill partly for the same reason but I still don't want to see the shops at the bottom of the hill underwater. Building new developments on a flood plain now does seem like utter madness though.

Hydrologists always live at the top of a hill
They clearly know something ...........

Responsibility of the builder as far as I'm concerned- if you make a faulty car, you don't blame the regulators for letting you sell it, or the customer for being stupid enough to buy it, the buck stops with them.

Responsibility of the builder as far as I'm concerned- if you make a faulty car, you don't blame the regulators for letting you sell it, or the customer for being stupid enough to buy it, the buck stops with them.

The builder just builds what he's told to build. The architect designs to the developers brief, which is driven by... a demand for houses on a flood plain.

If there was no demand, they wouldn't be built. So don't buy a house on a flood plain 🙄

Thing is, houses in the Fens haven't flooded, as Ver Muyden knew what he was doing. Water will always go where water has always gone, such as in Yalding. Flood defences merely delay the inevitable, letting the gullible and the greedy get caught out by nature just as they thought they had finally tamed her.

We all funded the Thames barrier to stop London flooding, it seems only fair to stump up for the rest of the country.

At least let us shoot the surveyors who signed off on the purchases.

Or the councillors who approved it as part of the local development plan....

Or the financiers who funded and ensured the profitability of such development

And any pensioners who received pensions based on the profitability of these developments to their pension funds.

40mpg - Member

The builder just builds what he's told to build

Fair point, should have said developer.

I won't link to daily mail, but Michael Evis has witten a good article about dredging on the Somerset levels.

Havent seen the article but dredging on the Somerset levels may have improved the flooding by about 10% and had a catastrophic effect on the environmental aspects of the rivers, you cant have it both ways.

Who is going to pay for this work to be done, out budget has been slashed in the last 4 years and the mantra "Do more with less" is getting really dull. We are going to lose 1800 members of staff by November 10% of workforce.

The levels are a drained swamp and the rain has been unprecented, yesterdays Mail headline was one of the most disingenous things I have ever seen. The histrionics of the local MP is just sad.

Bringing in the army is a knee jerk reaction to be seen to be doing something by politicians who dont really understand the problem.

They're taking very serious though and I have declared War on Water there's even live updates.

https://twitter.com/WaronWater

^+1 million. The ideological political slanging match is very annoying and frustrating for everyone who works in this field. There has been no evidence or science in any of the media reports (return period of event, comparisons with historical events, quantification of the effect dredging might have had and the consequences of such, etc).

I feel for those who have flooded, but this is a very rare occurence. I also feel for those working in the EA, local Council and similar services who are being slatted, when they generally do a fantastic job under very difficult circumstances.

It's a tricky one, I can't see that dredging will make [i]that[/i] much difference, look at how much water there is, many times the river's capacity, even if dredged. Defences just move the water somewhere else and flood that.

You shouldn't build on a flood plain, that's the bottom line.

By the power of the tin-ter-web the flooded Somerset village constantly in the news was recorded as Micelenie in the Domesday book meaning 'the increasingly great island' from the Old English miclian.

So the thick end of a thousand years ago this part of the UK flooded and sadly for the people who choose to live there today sometimes in the UK its rains… …a lot.

Mind you that doesn’t excuse this and previous Government’s for abandoning rain/river maintenance/management over the last 20+ years, whilst wasting £Ms on ‘environmental’ pet projects.

Good to see the Army is now on the case, expect to see progress soon!

By the time the water is in the river it's too late. All dredging does it make the flood arrive more quickly. We should be re-foresting the uplands to retain the water on the land. Wooded areas take up about 20 times more water than grassland but our current environment secretary is a Luddite and will not take the time to learn about his brief properly. There aaas a good article in the Guarniad at the weekend on just this subject.

The ones that **** me off more than anything are the ones where you hear their home has flooded before, but they're complaining that their newly hand laid £5k wooden floor is destroyed 👿

Speaking as a Somerset native (albeit one from higher ground), I look forward to an outraged [i]Fail[/i] article on why King Canute should have made more of an effort to hold back the tide.

Nicked this from another forum...

Obviously dredging works to alleviate local flooding, it just sends the problem downstream to someone else. The problem for the Somerset Levels (which I lived on the edge of for 44 years) is that they are at the downstream end of the line, there is nowhere downstream to send the problem to.

When all the land is less than 6 foot above sea level and the flood banks are up to 12 foot above the land your are ****ed once the flood banks overtop. You can't pump the water off the land back into the river channels until it stops raining.

Dredging to drop the bed level will be of no help when the river beds are already at, below or only just above sea level. It would take a huge dredging effort to even double the volume of the river/drain channels but this would make almost no difference because the volume of water flowing down is thousands of times the channel volume.

The problems for the levels are miles upstream in the ever expanding towns and villages which speed up run off. All the agricultural land drainage, maize growing and hedge ripping out doesn't help either. I can't recall the exact figures but I think it is something like every 1 acre of the levels receives the water from 6 acres of hills. The only real hope is to slow the runoff from the upstream areas.

my neighbours live on a flood plain in a meander - in a house called "the old mill"

they have flood defences in place - its called - when the river gets high - move shit up stairs.

sockets and cabling are all high up - and the floor and wall are tiled.

water comes in - water goes out - floors and walls are mopped.

repeat.

its not for me - but the house was cheap 😀

'the increasingly great island'

[img] [/img]

Somerset was pushing the limits of [url= http://www.megalithic.co.uk/article.php?sid=504 ]rad 'shore gnar[/url] [i]long[/i] before the Canucks.

Just read Michael Evis dit in the daily whale

Environment Secretary Owen Paterson and his civil service underlings seem keener to spend millions protecting river oysters, water voles and umpteen species of birds than a single penny on protecting the hard-working farming families who are just trying to make an honest living from the land.

and

When Mr Paterson came to the area at the weekend he brought a police escort but no wellington boots.

Ok troll mode off for second. But who's responsibility is it to dredge local rivers that no longer have commercial reasons to dredge? Should I be paying through my tax dollars for the environment agency to dredge the river parrot?

The Levels were first drained by the Romans, and Domesday records that the area was widely settled from the 11th century onwards.

So do we forcibly evict the inhabitants of this area because of decisions made more than 1,000 years ago? Or perhaps stop being so effing tight and pay a very small amount so that their homes and amenities can be properly protected.

So we want sterile rivers and land and 1000 cow dairy units. 🙄

Evis should know better, farmer biting the hand that feeds, amazing.

He did seem to have nice brand new blue Barbour - rural fail I'm afraid.

Agree about dredging - doesn't that just reduce the lag time and the eventual amplitude of the discharge curve? In practice, how does that stop this happening in the levels. As tango man put it, should the attention be upstream and slowing the run-off there?

Evis is an idiot. He's upstream of the levels, his farming practices are contributing to this water in the levels not that he seems able to see it.

No one is against spending money to solve problems, the point is dredging wont work so its a waste of money.

However, faced with 25 sq miles of flooding and the wettest january since records began there isn't actually much you can spend money on to fix this. Thats why climate change is a bitch.

man 0 - nature 1

A lot of contractors will make money out of the dredging while EA's plant will sit idle.

I imagine if the EA start dredging the rivers around Somerset then there'll be many other communities asking why they're not doing the same to their waterways. The answer is quite obviously "nae cash" - especially when it's effectively an endless task.

Incidentally the coverage on sky news is horrifically presented with absolutely zero scientific knowledge. They're getting all too Daily Mail for their own good. Anyone would think this is on the same scale as hurricane Katrina.

He's upstream of the levels

Doesn't feel like it on day 4 of a wet Glasto... 😯

They're getting all too Daily Mail for their own good

I sometimes wonder if the nail->head content of the [i]Daily Mash[/i] has forced the mainstream media to up their game to new levels of idiocy.

A lot of contractors will make money out of the dredging while EA's plant will sit idle.

then the flooding will subside as it's stopped raining and everyone will say, "Look dredging worked."....

how did rivers manage before they had people around to dredge them 😕

According to the Mail the E.A. sold its dredging kit 20 years ago which is before the E.A. actually existed 🙄

From the BBC

Early figures suggest parts of England have had their wettest January since records began more than 100 years ago.

Statistic to deflect any responsibility...

Why is it whenever anything like this happens the immediate demand of the reactionary idiots is to 'bring the army in'. Can the army stop it raining?

The mail is wrong.

The EA still has a lot of long reach 360's and some draglines. The EA came about from a merger of 3 organisations National Rivers Authority, Inspectorate of Pollution and the waste regulation authorities.

I must admit a fair few of the draglines were sold off.

The coalition will hand out some mops and buckets and tell the flood affected to get on with it themselves and stop expecting the state to help them.

Why call in the army? So it appears as if they are doing sometging.

What happens next year if we get a massive plague of locusts decending on middle england? Will the EA get canned for not having enough large nets to catch them, and for having "Underinvested" in locust catching machines for the last few years?

Sorry, but "sh*t happens". if you don't want it to keep happening to you, do something about it yourself, don't just point the finger and complain that "everyone else has been negligent"......

Last year our council got slagged for not having enough salt for the roads (after using up a year's supply in a month because it was Snowy As **** Man. This year... They're getting slagged for buying too much salt, because it hasn't snowed.

Newspaper forecasting is easier than weather forecasting I think.

What happens next year if we get a massive plague of locusts decending on middle england? Will the EA get canned for not having enough large nets to catch them, and for having "Underinvested" in locust catching machines for the last few years?

No, the politicians'll just call us in to deal with that as well, on top of everything else we're doing. Like making even more people redundant.

Don't know what they expect us to be able to do in Somerset really other than provide what lots of others already are, i.e. 4x4 fording capability, we have no high volume pumps and whilst we can fill loads of sandbags it's a bit late for them now. Seems a bit shutting door, horse, bolted...

EDIT: In previous postings I've had direct experience of the military contribution to dealing with floods - Cumbria, East Anglia/East Coast - and we were called in early enough to be able to do something to at least mitigate against the effects, if not actually stop it raining...

Hvis det ikke var for oversvømmelser i Somerset Levels ville vi alle være tale dansk.

It's hard to know whether dredging would've made much difference

The NRA /EA stopped dredging Somerset 20 years ago
So it's an easy argument to make that this has come to a head after these exceptional storms because the rivers weren't fat flowing enough (anyone have any actual evidence either way)

Saying that it's the fault of people living near rivers isn't really fair if the land has been managed artificially for hundreds of years then you could reasonably expect it to be kept up
East Anglia being a case in point (much of it is below sea level The sea will reclaim it eventually if maintenance is not kept up
And rising sea levels probably mean that the job will only get harder

In my previous life as a claims manager I've had first hand experience of floods, and I feel really sorry for those affected.

However, it does seem to me that people, egged on by a sensationalist media looking for a great picture, sound bite and fall guy, have got so comfortable with the modern western way of life that they have no grasp of how these events can still occur [i] where they have historically always occurred[/i] and how to deal with them when they happen. We've just had the wettest January on record, of course some areas will have massive problems as a result.

Anyone still remember last years lovely summer riding? This is the payback.....

This may or may not be a contributory factor to the flooding but I find it interesting. I've been photographing the Somerset levels for the best part of 30 years and in all that time the only thing to have changed is the industry, there is none now. There used to be various factories harvesting the peat and to do so they used to pump millions of gallons of water off the levels all through the year thereby drying out the peat which is like a huge sponge. The enviromentalists came along and said digging peat was a bad thing and so the digging and so the pumping stopped thereby allowing the moors to fill up with water. Now when we have heavy rains the land can not absorb the water so it needs to get to the sea. However the rivers are now so small that the flow through them is restricted and when the floods coincide with high tides the amount of time that the sea gates can be open for is less.

The effects of dredging, a nice easy video.

[img] [/img]

We were using wellies to get in and out of the flat for 2 weeks. I can understand people moaning, regardless of choosing to buy somewhere risky. I still felt sorry for the people opposite, who had no power for the same period. The fact that they live on Riverside doesn't really come into play. Ours floods sometimes because the drainage is inadequate, or maybe broken. This time though, there was a risk that the channel next to us might actually overflow 🙁

Having said that, was nice feeding ducks from the balcony 🙂

[img] [/img]

People who live on the levels expect a bit of flooding from time to time. It was once a flooded marsh and Avalon was an island! It has been a managed wetland for centuries. But if you come here and see how much land is currently submerged you will understand how ridiculous the situation is. I was driving east over the polden and looking south it was like the sea had invaded.

Yes it's rained a lot. Not as much as 1910 still. The fact is, the EA have deliberately allowed the volume of the rivers to reduce and thus the water is not draining as quickly as it once could. So now it's a mismanaged wetland and all the old villages perched on slightly higher ground are cut off and threatened.

As Buzz says. Some people really don't have a bloody clue what they're talking about:

So we want sterile rivers and land and 1000 cow dairy units.

Evis should know better, farmer biting the hand that feeds, amazing.

What utter bollocks.
The 'sterile rivers' are very short stretches that are tidal, so brackish, and they're 40% full of thick, slimy grey silt and mud, about the only wildlife are mudworms. For many, many years the rivers and rhynes were looked after by locals who knew the whole area intimately, and kept flooding to a minimum, then a government quango was set up that decided it knew better than people who've lived there for generations how to manage it, and decided that it would let highly productive farmland return to a salt marsh, to appease the green lobby.
A huge amount of work has gone into creating the wetlands around Shapwick, Ham Wall, and the other reserves, which has helped by letting it flood, but allowing river flow to be obstructed by mud is irresponsible. It won't stop flooding, when there's so much water, but even the dimmest should be able to grasp that letting river beds fill up with crap is going to reduce the amount of water those rivers can carry out to sea.
Another contributing factor is that a proven method of absorbing heavy rainfall is tree planting on the surrounding hill-tops, but the hill farmers only get their EU grants if they clear the trees and shrubs from the hilltops! Utter, total ****ing madness, by brainless office drones who have no idea about land management. Planting lots of trees increases absorption of rainfall into the soil by approx 60%, which, along with keeping the lower ends of the rivers and rhynes clear, would keep flooding to a much more controllable level.
Now, wildlife habitats are being destroyed because of civil servants following dogma set up by people who only know theory, not the actual land that's affected.
No, I don't live on the levels, but I've spent a lot of time down there, read lots about their history, and have something approaching a clue as to why this is happening, and why the locals are angry.
Blaming farmers like Eavis is typical townie rubbish; his farm borders the levels, and his cattle move onto the levels for grazing at various times, and, just like virtually the entire British Isles, the land has to be managed like it has been for thousands of years; there's virtually nothing resembling a natural landscape in Britain, except for a few national parks, and remote parts of Scotland.

I've lived near the Somerset levels all of my life and there has always been areas of flooding (the road the boat was travelling along is none too flood but this is the first time I've seen it more than 18" deep.

The levels itself is largely below sea level, the rivers are one issue but then so are the ditches that surround the vast majority of the fields on the levels. Both require cleaning. As a child I remember helping a friends dad to clear some of the ditches in the spring time each year. Doesn't seem to happen anymore. A friends dad has farmed on the levels near Stathe for three generations (he's now in his 60s) and has never seen the water this deep before and noted it's now been at least 25 year since they've dredged that area of the river although they have reinforced the river bank with steel piles 15ish years ago.

On a seperate note bbc points west had an article on the new pontoon that's been put in place.. The presenter commented on the smell.. Guess he didn't notice the huge abattoir to the left of the camera shot lol.

The dredging video above is spot on and I only wish more people would watch such things before offering their unqualified opinion, particularly certain MPs. Draining peat is about the worst thing you can do in these places. Drained peat degrades releasing C02 in to the atmosphere as it goes, adding to Climate Change, increasing by retention, the available energy in the atmosphere, meaning rain events like this become more common.
When peat degrades, it loses its water absorbing capacity, meaning you get water between interstigial spaces between the peat particles only and not locked in the complex matrix of hummified organic matter. So, there is good reason to not drain peat, not least the increased water storing capacity of 'good' peat, when antecedent conditions allow it.
Also harvesting the peat lowers the height of the land, meaning it is closer to sea level, meaning the gradient reduces further for the water to drain to the sea. The degradation of peat due to exposure to air (the net effect of drainage) also causes the land level to drop. All the while the rivers are perched above the surrounding flood plain so when they over top, the water has to find a new way to sea, slowly.
It's a pickle for those that live there, but sometimes difficult decisions have to be made. Lose a few carrot fields to water every few years, or a few offices, homes or factories because the money to protect the towns was spent protecting some fields?

worst ive seen it in 25 years of living nearby......its like another estuary from Weston Super Mare