Floods!

GEORGE CLOONEY has become victim of the winter floods, as the grounds of his £10 million home have been submerged by water from the Thames.
High water levels have led to the Thames bursting its banks and flowing into the garden of the actor’s 17th-century Grade II listed house.
The water is standing yards from his front door and the Environment Agency still has flood alerts in place for the area surrounding Sonning-on-Thames, Berkshire.
(From today's DT. )

With the likes of Theresa May as a neighbour I wonder cynically (moi?) whether the politicians will be donning their wellies to show solidarity and manning the flood defences in the same way they weren't in Cumbria /Yorkshire/Scotland recently?

Durhamjen Thank you! That is the first article I have heard or read that has actually defined possible solutions to lessen these flood dangers

It has really annoyed me that none if the news programs or politicians have actually explained possible solutions.

The policians, all of them, make promises, issue sound bites and I doubt if any of them at all have much idea about the actual solutions presented in the article.

I am still a little sceptical about the real value of river dredging though. The rain does not just fall into rivers it falls on all the land in the catchment areas and when it is falling at the rate it has been it causes damage in the small streams etc long before it flows into the rivers.

Many of the streams in the hilly areas Lake district Snowdonia have rocky mountain streams that are not dredgeable and in fact have little soft sediment. It is largely rocky scree as the last glaciation has denuded a lot of the overlying soft sediment in these hilly areas, certainly compared with flat river valley areas.
The speed with which the rain pours off these hard unabsorbent rocky areas means that they can carry a serious load of debris with them which further batters the river beds and gouge out the rivers picking up more softer sediment which is the stuff that gets carried much further down into the rivers as a storm is happening. This rocky debris carried by the water is what has destroyed those roads damaged in Cumbria.

In flatter less steep areas and high moorland land with better sediment levels, say the Yorkshire Dales there should be more more room to provide space to slow down and disperse this water.

The Lake District is steep, very rocky and very close to the river outlets there is less ground available here to slow down this water flow at all.

I'm also angry about John MacDonald referring to a "right wing clique" of Labour MP's. How very dare he!

But Ana you must realise that wasn't a real Labour government that was a Blairite government. A real leader, like Corbyn, sacks perfectly good, solid labour MPs, like our Pat McFadden, who has never voted against the party in his 12 years (unlike some I could name)

Pity indeed.

Pity the Labour government of the time didn't act upon that report - surely they knew about it.

The Environment Agency knew 12 years ago that there would be a problem if the Foss barrier failed in York. There was a report on it.

www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2016/01/06/a-woeful-response-to-flooding-as-the-climate-crisis-hits-home/

Environment Agency said that flood defences did not fail; they were simply "tested beyond design".
So that's okay then.

Take that back. It's raining again.

Our village on the news today. The only village in Durham completely cut off for a time. Rain stopped now, though.
£2 million pounds of flood relief last year to stop the houses and shops being flooded, but it was the local farmers coming into the village and manning the pumps that worked. Otherwise the houses would have been inundated again. Thank you, farmers.

www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/uk-flooding-how-a-yorkshire-flood-blackspot-worked-with-nature-to-stay-dry-a6794286.html

This is interesting. It's Pickering. I've been there when it was flooded.
Very nice town when it's not flooded, as in the summer last year.

Perhaps it's all the weeping .....

Hope no-one gets flooded

It's still raining!

What was Osborne's criticism of Brown, he didn't fix the roof while the sun was shining?
Laughable now, isn't it?
Osborne forgot the drains are important as well.

www.independent.co.uk/voices/the-floods-have-revealed-the-imbecility-of-osborne-s-target-a6794846.html

www.mysociety.org/

The easy way to write to your MP or find out what they have been doing in parliament, just in case anyone wants to be reminded.

Good idea annodomini

The main road near here was flooded today, luckily there was an alternative (longer) route around.

"I"m ok Jack"! That's a bit blatant isn't it?

There is money available for flood relief from the EU Solidarity Fund but our Government hasn't make an application to it. I would like to know why and am going to ask my MP. Perhaps if you are as non-plussed by this inaction as I am, you would like to do so too.

And for balance (as they say on the Beeb - because the blog above is by a leftwing economist) there is an article in The Economist this weekend (hardly the more left-learning newspaper ) entitled Northern Waterhouse (p17)
I'll summarise as it is behind a paywall.

6,700 properties flooded in N of England (it went to press pre-Frank i think)
Embarrassing for PM re so-called northern powerhouse "and he deserved it"
Post 2010 he reduced spending on flood prevention by 1/5 - "bit of a splurge" after Somerset but now dropped back to below the amounts being spent when he entered Downing St. : "hundreds of relatively cheap schemes have been cancelled including one that could have prevented the flooding in Leeds"
EA only responsible for rivers and coasts - only 40% of the recent floods fall into this category.
Local authority responses were poor because deep cuts have affected emergency response and ongoing investment.
People helped themselves. And social media e.g. Twitter often better source if info than councils.

There is a map Rosequartz that shows that 28/11 to 28/12 there were 82 flood warnings in the SW of England and 928 across the North of England.

I'm in Somerset and I'm ok Jack!
Were you flooded last time Galen? It must be terrible, thank goodness my relatives live slightly higher up and the farmers keep the ditches around their village cleared so they were not flooded last time either, although marooned for some time.

Well, some roads have been flooded in Somerset, but of course the emphasis has been on reporting the terrible floods up North.

Somerset hasn't had remotely the level of rain they had last time

Well, of course, I only know from relatives who live there; storms, roof tiles blown off, deluges of rain. But the Levels have drained because the rivers have been dredged.
They probably have not had the amount that they had in 2013/14 thank goodness.

I'm n Somerset and I'm ok Jack!

Somerset hasn't had remotely the level of rain they had last time.

They have also missed the worst of the rain this time. So far. 2 years ago it was unusually far south and the Thames valley was also flooded.
The rain has hit N Wales, Cumbria, Lancashire, Yorkshire and Scotland this time. So far.