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UK Floods; paying the price of Tory cuts..


NormanH
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Readers may recall that it was a little under two years ago that I and my neighbours were up to our armpits in River Thames. This, after some £100 million had been spent over preceding years on a flood relief scheme that certainly kept the feet of the good burghers of Bray (upstream) much drier, but simply shifted the problem downstream to villages like ours which had last properly flooded in 1946.

The first time this expensive flood relief scheme was put to the test was 2003, when flooding was nowhere near the levels reached in 2014. Flaws were uncovered and the EA sued the main contractors and 3.5 million pounds of remedial work was undertaken.

Here, I am talking about a scheme which protects maybe 8-10 miles of the Thames, and which was installed initially some 15 years ago, so the figures quoted date from then, when it was built.

With the recent unprecedented rainfall levels in certain parts of the country, anyone want to have a go at estimating the cost of reproducing suitable schemes countrywide on the scale now required?

Oh, and ours took about 20 years from conception to fruition and was still about as effective as a damp sandbag when things got really serious, so chucking something together between now and the next heavy downpour has about as much chance of success as a little Dutch boy's finger.

IIRC, it's not all that long ago that there were similar scenes of devastation not a million miles from Norman's principal barrel. Can't recall reading of subsequent massive expenditure by France to prevent a recurrence. But times are tight there, too.

I wonder where we should find all this money. Cut pensions? Close a couple of hospitals? A school or two?

I have no political axe to grind (I dislike all of them with equal passion) but am always tickled by the rush to condemn coupled with a reluctance to accept any form of belt tightening, as if Whitehall is sitting on vast piles of spare cash that should somehow be released in the same way as the flood waters, allowing us all to wake up tomorrow in a verdant Utopia.

I have very good reason to feel sorry for those affected by the recent flooding. We escaped a similar fate by the skin of our teeth. But I will say one thing, and I've heard a few people say something similar on TV over the last couple of weeks.

Yes, flood waters can be held back or diverted by some form of flood defence scheme. But, when it rains and rains for weeks on end, and I watched this happen in my very own home, it isn't the water coming from the rivers and streams you need to be afraid of, oh no. It's the water that suddenly bubbles up through the sink, or the toilet bowl, or just from under the floorboards. Because, after a while, even the ground your house is built on gets full. And there is NOTHING more frightening than waiting for that moment you can't prevent with sandbags or flood defences or anything else, because you can't stop it. And nor can Cameron or Corbyn or anyone else.

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[quote user="You can call me Betty"]Readers may recall that it was a little under two years ago that I and my neighbours were up to our armpits in River Thames.......................... ................................................................................................... And there is NOTHING more frightening than waiting for that moment you can't prevent with sandbags or flood defences or anything else, because you can't stop it. And nor can Cameron or Corbyn or anyone else.[/quote]

A good post.

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I dont disbelieve that it happened Betty, the water coming up from the drains, as I have heard it elsewhere but it cannot have been from groundwater unless your garden was flooded to the same level (water always finds it own level) and in which case it would have been coming in through your front door. Perhaps the garden was flooded and you had sandbags over the doors?

If it were to happen on my house it would need the drains to be pressurised by a head of water, technically possible but unlikely unless I was pumping my sewage uphill to discharge in a river, except rivers are always at the lowest point, lets say a lake then and I didnt have a clapet anti retour, in any case were the drains to be flooded and pressurised then the manhole covers would lift and my garden (allright terrace) would flood anyway.

so how does it happen?

 

I know of an underground car park in Tonbridge that my fireman pal had to attend to pump out, flooding was expected and there was a sump and pump that took the water away to an outlet in the bank above the river (is it the river Ton?) but it had not been fitted with a clapet anti-retour, this year the river was at its highest level and reached above the pipes outlet, it wasnt even raining when the car park suddenly flooded. I can see that if someone had secretly connected their mains drainage to that pipe then they would have had a nasty surprise, I bet there are many like that in rural France!!!

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The river flowing through Tonbridge is the Medway - eldest daughter used to live there. She left in ?2012, and visited friends there just after the floods of ?2013 - the street where she lived had been flooded out. Her old neighbour had carpets etc outside.

As Betty says, maybe throwing money at the problem isn't the answer. It won't be long before many parts of the country where people are living will soon be uninhabitable.

BTW, we haven't heard anything this time about the Somerset flats - remember a year or 2 ago?

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Fortunately for the people living on the Somerset Levels the worst of the rainfall has been further north.

It seems that the problems in York were worsened because of economies in routine maintenance. It is not just a case of large capital outlays to improve the situation - all this expensive equipment needs to be kept in proper working order. I know these flood prevention schemes are very expensive but the costs when flooding occurs are also very high. It seems that there were EU grants available to help with these costs but because of pressure from anti-EU ministers these have not been applied for.

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Chancer, I'm not looking for an argument. It happened.

As you are unfamiliar with the location, construction and layout of my previous house, and those of my neighbours, the amount of rainfall, etc.. It is what it is.

I'm married to a civil engineer. The first thing he did before we ever looked like getting flooded was block all the airbricks around ground level, as well as making up sandbags. He spent most of the time during that week looking down manhole covers outside the house for signs of water, even though it wasn't lapping at the doorstep.

I flushed the downstairs toilet at 1 am on the first night of severe flooding (the Thames is some 100 yards from my former front door) and the water just rose and rose in the bowl until it stopped, millimetres from the rim, and stayed there.

Neighbours who were in the midst of renovations - across the road, further from the river, knocked on our door to tell us that they'd lifted their living room floorboards to discover a lake.

During meetings at the village hall, the Environment Agency told us that ground water was becoming a more serious problem than flooding from the river. The fire brigade laid half a mile of hose to pump the ground water which had turned our local recreation ground into a lake back to the Thames. The local hotel wasn't flooded from outside, but they were pumping water from their cellar for a month.
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All that scheme did was move the water......Cookham flooded and was divided in half, the village became an island, luckily with a raised causeway and timed access, it made life very difficult for my mothers carers.

By the way Chancer my parents house was on a hill, in the late 50's it was a new build, one of about 50 houses basically in four horizontal rows across a significant slope, the first winter rains meant our kitchen flooded because the soil ( clay ) was so sodden the water flowed down the surface through gardens into houses at the bottom of the development....who were also in danger of being flooded from the other side because the drains couldn't cope.. Once the gardens were planted it didn't happen again.
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I cannot remember if it was the Mayor of Keswick or Windemere interviewed on the news during the floods, and he said that part of the problem was that the EU had said that waterways should not be dredged.

I cannot remember anyone contradicting him.

IF that is the case, what on earth is the EU about, apart from the politicans and bureaucrats lining their pockets, legitimately with amounts they decide???? Do they care of the repercussions of their actions.......... I have no doubt that they care even less than our own elected politicians  and bureaucrats do![:@]

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I don't think the EU has banned dredging..there are plenty of examples of French rivers being dredged. I think the problem is dredging in itself doesn't solve everything.. it has to be part of a complete flood management plan. The uK seems to be lacking in that respect..there are EU subsidies available to pay for flood management plans but I don't know whether the UK has ever applied for them?

We had flooding in the first couple of years in our new house here. The basement would become an indoor swimming pool after one of the torrential storms that occur here quite regularly. We solved it in the end by digging a really deep drain to the level of the ground rock all along the front of the house, like a moat! It now diverts the water away from the house.
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[quote user="You can call me Betty"]Chancer, I'm not looking for an argument. It happened. As you are unfamiliar with the location, construction and layout of my previous house, and those of my neighbours, the amount of rainfall, etc.. It is what it is. I'm married to a civil engineer. [/quote]

 

There was no arguing, I said I believe you but being a bloke and an engineer I wanted to understand why, knowledge that may one day come in usefull.

 

I am pleased to say that you have answered my question, the level of the flood outside was such that it would have reached up close to your floorboards which is why I think your Wise husband was blocking airbricks and laying sandbags, the water that you flushed down your loo would not have been able to descend any further than that level, just below your floor before backing up in the bowl as it did, even worse if you had been flushing an upstairs loo which would eventually cause effluent to flow out of the downstairs loo and sinks, it would not be the rising flood water coming up but preventing your waste water from going down, as you add to it the soilpipe slowly fills up.

 

My house in the UK was comprehensively destroyed by a tenant that continued flushing the toilet after having blocked the pipe, instead of unblocking it or calling someone in he ignored the bowl filling up because "it eventually drained away" yes it did, from the WC pipe seal, Under the bathroom lino onto the kitchen cieling eventually bringing it down and flooding the kitchen and hall.

 

And he had the cheek to say it was my fault, that the cistern was leaking, it wasnt and if it was the water would just have gone down the drain had it not been blocked, took me nearly a year with that useless authority the Deposit protection scheme, he refused to accept their arbitration so I just palyed hardball and mentally wrote the money off, he was rich enough and stubborn enough to have left the whole of his £1800 deposit remaining with the DPS, and now I realise what their real strategy is, neither he or I could get to it without winning in court but as he had moved to Australia that wasnt going to happen, eventually my patience paid off and he agreed to negotiate, I let him get one over on me to a large degree because it put an end to the dispute and I had already mentally wrote the money off and wanted to move on.

 

Anyway for those whose house is in danger of being flooded, ie the flood water approaching the level of their sewage drain depth be very carefull about flushing toilets, use the ground floor ones in preference to the upper floors that way you should see when to stop using them completely without doing any damage, never continue flushing a toilet that is slow to drain at any time, especailly an upper floor one.

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But you can get ground water popping out halfway up a hill...its to do with the location of aquifers and the composition of the ground. If you have a chalky or limestone substrate, for example. Our garden wasn't underwater...and there was none under our floorboards. Trust me, you can smell when it is! Yet our next door neighbours and those opposite did have water under their floors. The water will come out where it finds a way. Houses down the road from ours flooded good and proper, yet the road was dry and so were the houses of their neighbours.
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[quote user="lindal1000"]I don't think the EU has banned dredging..there are plenty of examples of French rivers being dredged. I think the problem is dredging in itself doesn't solve everything.. it has to be part of a complete flood management plan. The uK seems to be lacking in that respect..there are EU subsidies available to pay for flood management plans but I don't know whether the UK has ever applied for them?

We had flooding in the first couple of years in our new house here. The basement would become an indoor swimming pool after one of the torrential storms that occur here quite regularly. We solved it in the end by digging a really deep drain to the level of the ground rock all along the front of the house, like a moat! It now diverts the water away from the house.[/quote]

I totally agree with your comment about dredging.  Mention has been made of the Somerset levels.  In the past, flooding was allowed onto the water meadows.  They have ditches locally called rines to drain away the water after heavy rainfall.  In modern times, everywhere is more built up than formerly and concreted areas such as the floors of houses and front yards to enable car parking mean that there is less absorbent land for the water to go.

In our part of the Dordogne, there are big ditches on the sides of roads and they help enormously to drain away water from sudden, heavy rain.  That plus the fact that the land is principally calcaire and therefore very absorbent though everywhere it turns into thick mud.

Edit: just wanted to say that I changed a spelling error in case someone is wondering why my post shows last

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[quote user="You can call me Betty"]But you can get ground water popping out halfway up a hill...its to do with the location of aquifers and the composition of the ground. If you have a chalky or limestone substrate, for example. Our garden wasn't underwater...and there was none under our floorboards. Trust me, you can smell when it is! Yet our next door neighbours and those opposite did have water under their floors. The water will come out where it finds a way. Houses down the road from ours flooded good and proper, yet the road was dry and so were the houses of their neighbours.[/quote]

 

Yes I have had that with an underground gate operator on the side of a steep hill I had fitted a drain pipe to it to a small soakaway as I normally did and the water was coming up from that! There was a seam of blue clay underneath.

 

Your public sewer pipe will have been flooded to the level of the surface water, if you were unlucky not only was your sewage baking up towards your toilet bowl but if there are other houses on your sewer especially slightly higher than yours then there really is nothing much you can do but pray that they are not selfish, but humans are.

I live at the top of the cul de sac and at the top of the hill, at the bottom is a culverted brook which often floods, I only have the semi joined to mine upstream of me on the sewer and we both will not flush our toilets when the bottom of the road is flooded, the other neighbours arent so unselfish and the bottom house had has sewage floating in the garden but not yet coming up through the toilets.

 

Even though my ground level is probably at roof height of the dwellings adjoining the brook/river I still get his with the high insurance premiums because they just load all properties within a certain radius regardless of the topography, if there were biblical floods there would be thousands of dwellings whose premuims are not loaded that would flood and no doubt have people drown before water would creep up to my house.

Here in France I would only need 1" of standing water on my terrace before my cellar would flood as I have put an external staircase into it, but that would only happen if someone sandbagged my side gate and blocked all my downpipes, otherwise it would just run out of the gate across the car park and down the road to lower ground, where there is a dry river bed that floods every 15 years [:(]

When I laid my enclosed terrace in block paving I made it fall away from the cellar entrance in all 3 directions leading directly to my front door, after a heavy downpour I have to paddle in and out till it drains away, the cellar would fllod before my apartment, hope it never  happens, the plumbing leaks I have had there have been catastrophic enough.

Oh and due to having walls with no foundations laid straight onto chalk which become mush when wet, the cellar floor having been lowered before me to beneath the bottom course of bricks plus the opening I made for the external entrance if my cellar did flood the building would most likely collapse [:-))]

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Well I looked it up and googled:

European Water

Framework Directive (EWF) 2000

and this page came up

https://www.google.co.uk/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&q=European+Water+Framework+Directive+%28EWF%29+2000&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&gfe_rd=cr&ei=hj2JVsj8C43j8wecv574Ag

and then I looked at this and could not find anything, but after about 20 pages, felt like I was losing the will to live!

http://ec.europa.eu/environment/water/water-framework/index_en.html

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Cameron and Corbyn cannot solve all of the flood problems - certainly true - but they sure as hell can make things a whole lot worse.

There is a complete lack of joined up thinking and the examples quoted, where one areas flood defence makes the risks for the next area up or down stream so much worse demonstrate this.

Each case has to be looked at carefully and a solution for one area will be the wrong thing to do in another. Take the statement about dredging being ineffective. For a cash strapped EA dredging cannot be an effective measure anywhere because they do not have the cash to keep it up. At best in such circumstances it can only be a short term palliative. Nevertheless in the case of the Somerset Levels if continued it is the only effective solution provided that it is maintained. The levels are water meadows and are designed to flood - just not to 5ft and more. Just like your car, having a regular service is not mandatory, but eventually if you do not there will be a price to pay. Likewise dredging and the Levels. The only other solution would be a very expensive Dutch style solution of dykes and automated drainage systems - and just like Holland, the waterways would still need to be kept clear with dredging. I will concede however that dredging is not a good solution in every case.

The problems with the Levels (and I return back to my opening comments about Cameron and Corbyn having it in their gift to make things very much worse) is that there is no joined up thinking in government. Government have decreed that due to the housing shortage, Somerset should plan to increase its housing stock by over 20,000 properties. I invite you to look at a map of Somerset and decide where these extra houses are going to go, if not encroaching on and draining their rainwater onto the Levels. In fact the favoured sites of Taunton and Weston will both end up further restricting the river flows and drainage from the levels.

Solutions have to look at things as widely divergent as:

Tree planning on uplands to allow better uptake of rainfall and slow down the run off.

Curbing gripping of moorland - which does the reverse.

Designating farmland that will become water meadows and compensating the owners.

Replanting hedges and making farm fields smaller, to slow down the run off of water and absorb a portion of it.

Taxing people for concreting/flag-stoning over parts of their gardens - with planning restrictions to ensure at least partial absorption of rainfall through selection of materials of construction.

Slowing down the flow of streams in upland areas using mini dams and obstructions.

Only then can we sensibly think about building flood walls down the sides of rivers, pumping and barrier solutions.
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Agreed, Andy. But if the government's thinkng isn't joined up, then the public's is probably even less so...and the media's less still. The latter are clearly advocating a massive knee jerk reaction involving the opening of some mythical financial flood gate which will apparently solve the problems overnight. Crikey, over the past couple of years there hasn't even been any consistency in the location of the floods, let alone anything else.

If millions had been allocated to Somerset, it would have been sod all use to people in York, yet when Somerset flooded, York didn't. This time round it was York, entre autres, that copped it. However joined up the thinking, nobody can predict who will need help most, or next. Short of constructing flood defences out of used tenners, there's no quick fix, however much money is available.
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Some of Andy's solutions have been used for many decades in Brittany, where rainfall could well exceed that of Somerset.  The tree planting and retention of hedgerows with smaller fields combined with meticulous and regular tending of roadside ditches and runoffs seems to work very well indeed.  I suspect the original intention was to reduce erosion of precious topsoil but a happy side effect is that these methods help to divert the excess rainfall back into the water table.

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Well said Andy. There was a piece in The Times today that mentioned a few of your points.

Beaver...they have been known to help reduce flooding as well.

However, what ever policy is put into place there needs to be a concerted effort to get the farmers on our side as well. Removing the bunds that farmers have built between their lower flood plain land and the rivers would be a good start. Upper Moorland management would also help, this would mean Grouse estates as well as conifer plantation estates as the two are at odds at the moment with how they drain the land.

A concerted, coordinated effort then.... yeh...as if ! 

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I would like to point out that records show that York has been subject to large scale floods for over 800 years i.e. since the year dot ! I find it uncomfortable to blame any one cause; Tories, Global Warming, the price of fish.  It just so happens that York was built on a confluence of rivers that drain the Yorkshire Dales and common sense dictates that once in a while too much rain will cause a problem.
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I absolutely agree HSD. The simple and simplistic mantra of don't build on flood plains, ignores the fact that historically man has always done exactly that.

Someone once suggested that we pull down housing on flood plains and I had to point out that we would need to destroy a few fairly important (flood prone) cities in the process:

Paris, Nantes, Rouen, Avignon(to keep things topical), London, Hull (Kingston upon), Gloucester, Cheltenham, York, Preston, Dumfries (for those UK based), Dresden, Berlin, Rotterdam, Antwerp, Prague, Budapest, Beograd (Belgrade) - for wider European examples, Cairo, Dakar, New Orleans and so on and so on.

The fact is that man has historically built towns and cities close to water courses because they provide water (for drinking and irrigation), a simple means of transport of goods by ship, and cities then tend to develop where the watercourses can be bridged.

The question is therefore not simply about building on the flood plain. It is about how do we protect the existing towns so built - against the background where perhaps the intensity of severe rainfall has become worse, and certainly the frequency of such heavy rainfall would seem to have increased. How do we protect what we already have and at the same time build for the future and those that do not yet have. We need new housing, but building (without restriction or careful planning) on flood plains may not be the answer.

In the 40 years I have been an adult, things have changed dramatically. Supposedly safe places have flooded for the first time in XX years. (Actually York seems to have flooded throughout that time as an aside). There is a danger of over reaction, but we will only be able to judge that in another couple of hundred years. In the mean time, I believe it makes sense (short term perhaps) to take actions that will reverse some of the things we (man) have done for centuries that make the likelihood of flooding that much greater.
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It is not city flood plains that should be left bare of buildings, but those further up river, which are now being built on. In the past, rivers flooded along their countryside flood plains, thus protecting cities to some extent. The problem now is that more and more development is taking place on greenfield sites outside of cities, and many of these are along flood plains. This leads to the water being channelled right down into the urban areas, with the results we have seen recently.

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And to be honest, this phenomenon was exactly what saved our bacon. The side of the Thames on which we lived is densely built upon...although many of the houses, such as our old one, were built in the early part of the 19th century or before. The other side of the river is the Home Park...the grounds of Windsor Castle. These grounds are extensive and served as a flood plain, taking the vast majority of the flood water from the Thames. The road on our side was raised following the great flood of the 1940's, and this was what encourage the water to find its level on the other side.
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I don't know about blaming the government, but I think it's all the fault of the BBC ! When you get weather forecasters called Sarah Blizzard you can only expect bad weather. It's time they employed Monty Sunshine or at least Andy Fairweather!
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