Looks like a Sea around the Mump

These are the figures being quoted in the media

Area: 65 Square Kilometres = 65 x 1,000 x 1,000 = 65,000,000 Square Metres.
Volume: 1.5 Million Tonnes of water = 1.5 Million Cubic Metres of water.

Average Depth = Volume/Area = 1,500,000/65,000,000 = 0.023 Metres = 23mm (less than one inch!)

So what's the problem? You don't even need wellies for water that depth, a pair of crocs would suffice. If they've got their sums wrong they've probably ordered the wrong size pumps. Or are they only going to reduce the level of the floodwater by one inch?

I suspect that, as the army of reporters probably outnumbers the army sent to The Levels, they've been sent out and told to make themselves visible to avoid reports of army nowhere to be seen.

 

I'm gauging the depth from a tree I can see from the house, when I can see the trunk then I know its going down. Not seen the trunk since before Christmas.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glastonbury_Lake_Village

Somerset has been underwater on and off for thousands of years. Don't know why anyone's surprised or thinks that dredging is going to prevent it totally. I'm still really, really sorry for the people that are having to put up with it though.

 

It wouldn't prevent it, but it will lessen the amount of water there and for less time, so less damage to land/houses, Hopefully

 

I'm waiting for BTO, Natural England, etc. to object to dredging because it will adversely affect bird habitats.

 

I hear on the news that the army might be going in to help.

Are they there yet?
What are they doing/can they do?

I remember trying to find a route home in the 2007 flood that sunk Sheffield (where I was living at the time). I worked on one side of the Don valley and lived on the other, so neither work nor home was flooded (fortunately) but everything in between was. I remember thinking as I tried one route after another in the most monumental traffic jam I've ever seen, that if they'd got the Royal Engineers on the case, they could have had temporary bridges in place within hours.

 

They're here, all sorts of stuff going on, saw a pic of a long pontoon bridge, but haven't been able to confirm it or find the pic again

Cones all along the road toward Muchelney, they don't want sight seers going down there.
More rain today, and its forecast for much of february too, then it'll take 4 to 6 weeks for the floods to subside after that.

 

I read somewhere the money used for dredging has been spent on a large Wildlife/ nature Park venture. This would be also flooded now. So not good thinking at all. I do feel for the folk who are flooded also the farmers coming from a farming backgound myself.

 

A lot of folk have pointed out that, yes the levels flood, and you should expect it if you live here.

That's true, they flood every year usually, but apart from a few pics on here and a few diversions we just normally get on with it.

Some folk on the radio were saying we should expect it if we live below sea level, i'd like to set the record straight there, as far as I can see, no part of the levels are below sea level, Muchelney is 7-9 metres above, and most of the spot heights on the normal flood plains are about 5 to 6 above.

Non of the older buildings are built in the areas that normally flood, we know about this and it would be madness to build there.

In the past few years however, the floods have passed the traditional boundaries and flooded the "Ey"s Viking for Island, all the villages ending in "Ey" have been safe places to build and live since Alfred the Great's time. Thorney, Muchelney, Pitney etc.

The folk living there have always dealt with the roads around them getting flooded, but to have the water 2 foot deep in the living room 2 years running is starting to get us all a bit worried.

 

What about post glacial rebound or whatever's it's called, where the North rises and the South sinks?

 

Well I don't know about the south sinking, but there are certainly alarming things happening in the north sea.

For as long as I've been alive, the tide never actually reached the dunes. The high tide line was always about 50 yards from the start of the dunes. I was along there today, and a chunk of the dunes has simply been eaten by the sea.

You can clearly see how the sea has eaten it away, but if you look at the bottom right of the pic, its been over the top, you can see the detritus its deposited on top. That just isn't normal.

Now bear in mind that I'm quite far north. The north sea at my bit of the world is very wide, but it gets narrower as you move south, so presumably that tide that ate our dunes would have done a lot worse further south. This isn't normal.

 

True Scrunge, but its not as simple as that, whilst the Isle of Wight is sinking, the West is pivoting a bit, taking Dunster Castle up a bit ( the sea came upto the base of it when it was built) and plunging Frinton into the sea on the other side.

 

Here's some interesting stuff http://www.telegraph.co.uk/topics/w...-in-to-sort-out-Somerset-Levels-flooding.html