… it floods!
I am getting increasingly annoyed about the bleating that is currently going on in the flooding in the UK. There is a reason it is called a floodplain and people who choose to live on them should expect it. It is very easy to find out if a property is at risk – the environment agency has a very good website with interactive maps. I’ve recently bought a new house, and it is close to a river but I’ve made damn sure it is not a risk of flooding (OK, I’ve got some specialist knowledge but it really isn’t that difficult). I deleted many from my shortlist of suitable houses precisely because of the likelihood of flooding. The general public in these areas if flooded blame failure of ‘flood defences’ yet those that are not flooded claim that they are ‘lucky’, not saved by flood defences. The weather, like terrorists, only has to be ‘lucky’ once. It is simply not possible to protect all of the people, all of the time – unless we stop building on floodplains.
But what really gets my goat is the local government politicians trying to pass the buck on to national government. Sure national government has some failings (I’ll come on to them in a moment) but for the likes of councillors in Hull to claim “whenever we have needed help from central government to improve things, we have been neglected” [The Guardian] is a bit rich. The response surely has to be “who the hell gave the planning permission to build there in the first place?” More than 90% of Hull is built below sea level with large housing estates on marsh land. It has to be the planning authorities that are largely to blame for the consequences. In most of the flooding TV footage I’ve seen the houses have been new builds (and those that haven’t been like in Stratford-upon-Avon are the ‘usual suspects’ and have been flooded many times).
OK, national government is not blameless either and we are finding out that the government is offering £14m of aid to flood-hit areas while drawing up plans to axe hundreds of jobs at the Environment Agency, which is responsible for flood defences [The Guardian]. Government ministers were warned three years ago about failing flood defences [The Guardian].
Is there a solution? Well the simple one is to stop building on floodplains and if it means that we have to rethink our attitudes to building on ‘greenbelt’ and redesignating floodplains as ‘bluebelt’, so be it. Yet government ministers insist that they will continue to build on floodplains [The Guardian]
- it hardly inspires confidence.
I’ll end this rant on the delicious irony that those of us with four-by-fours have been able to get a lot of places that those with eco-friendly cars haven’t in this ‘global climate change’ induced event.
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