Flooding Is Here To Stay!

The floods we have been seeing in large parts of the country are awful. Nobody can deny that. Those experiencing them deserve our sympathy and our help but what can be done to ensure that it doesn't happen again? In my view there is not a lot that can be done.

The water has to go somewhere. There are millions of cubic feet of water now on the ground that could not have been stopped from falling from the skies. That is an absolute fact. Flooding will never be stopped unless control of nature can be had. That is never going to happen. The only thing that we can actually do is to allow the water to flow as it always has onto the flood plains that have been created over millenia by previous floods waers. That is going to be very difficult in some cases as a lot of the flood plains have been built on.

Hundreds of years ago, in some cases thousands of years ago, towns and cities were built on the banks of rivers for good reasons. Firstly, the need to provide water and secondly because the rivers were the motorways of the day allowing easy transportation of people and goods. Those towns and cities have now expanded and are infringing on the floodplains. So should we be surprised that some of our dwellings are subject to flooding? I think not.

I have heard and read an awful lot of comment regarding this issue. One of the main topics appears to be that we are not dredging enough rivers. My view is that the dredging of rivers is really small beer in the scheme of things. Why do I say that? Simply because we are talking about an excess of millions of cubic feet of excess water. Dredging rivers would only allow a small percentage of that excess to remain in the watercourses whilst at the same time allowing the water to move downstream at a much higher rate than it would on a river that has not been dredged. It would carry the water downstream towards our urban areas more quickly and would still require to overspill the banks of the rivers at the same places as now.

What we really need to do is to allow the excess water to drain into floodplains as soon as possible and for those floodplains to be in rural localities. This brings us onto farmland. I hear the cry that if the farmland floods then where are the crops going to come from? This is a bit of a red-herring in the scheme of things for two reasons. Flooding does not necessarily wipe out crops simply because of the reasonably short nature of the flooding events and because of the time of year when floods normally occur, namely the winter months. Secondly, there normally is a surplus of crops worldwide which would allow any shortfall in yield in this country to effectively be made up. Yes that may make foodstuffs more expensive in the short term but we cannot have everything. Rural flooding is the way to go. It is far less damaging and dangerous than allowing built up areas to flood. That is something that needs to be considered and put into place. We need to accept, as I have said previously in this article that the millions of cubic feet of water needs to go somewhere. Fields and open countryside are the best options.

Now let's look at funding of flood defences. I keep seeing and hearing the call for the monies needed to reduce the flooding problem, because we are never going to be able to eliminate it, to come from the overseas aid budget. Why? I have heard the statement that we spend more on flooding overseas than we do in this country. Basically, that is correct but we need to put that into perspective. In other parts of the world, mostly in Asia, flooding is a catastrophe. Unlike in this country where flooding is very rarely the cause of people dying, in other parts of the world flooding takes thousands or lives and causes the loss of tens of thousands of dwellings, dwellings that are not only inundated by water but which are completely destroyed and washed away. Should we be ignoring that? Our overseas aid budget amounts to something like 15 to 17 billion pounds which sounds a huge amount of money but it is only 0.7% of our Gross Domestic Product i.e. the money that is generated in this country annually. Surely if we need to increase our spending on domestic flooding then it will be far easier and more morally correct to find that extra from the £1,500 billion that is allocated to being spent within our shores than the 15/17 billion sent abroad? I think so anyway.

So in summary. Nature sends the water down onto the earth and has done for thousands of years. Nature has found a way for that water to be accommodated on the floodplains of this country. Work with nature to reduce the effects of this flooding in the present day by using those floodplains that are not heavily populated to preserve those that are. Find the money to do what is necessary from the huge amount of money spent within our own borders; there are definitely contingency funds available.

We need to accept flooding as a part of the natural cycle of life and work with the causes of the problem and the natural solutions.

Please note. This article is only addressing my views on fluvial flooding i.e. that flooding from rivers and rainwater standing on the ground. There is also the concern regarding coastal flooding but that brings a whole different raft of problems and solutions.