Floods

I have the answer....Scrap HS2, Spend the money on Dutch Engineers they know about floods, Even their kids do, little boys finger in the dyke.
Got up early this morning ready to go, Have a nice day its not raining at the moment

 

I have the answer too, but mine doesn't involving Dutch boys or dykes.

As @fat controller correctly pointed out in another thread, it is wrong to look for a single solution. In fact, in the bigger picture, that sort of thinking (ie looking for a single cause and single fix) is what's fundamentally wrong in so many situations these days.

I remember sitting through one of many boring heal and safety inductions just after I left school. We were learning about the 'fire triangle'. A fire needs three things, heat, oxygen and fuel. Take just one of those away and the fire goes out, therefore to extinguish the fire you only have to starve it of any one of those things. Lets say someone throws a bucket of water on it. You could spend an eternity arguing whether the fire went out because the water cooled it enough or because the water blocked oxygen from meeting the fuel, but the fact is its both.

There are lots of things that cause flooding problems today. The drains are not up to the job because they are not maintained enough and they are expected to support more households using more water than they were designed to support. The weather is getting a bit more crazy. We're building on everything, laying down impervious surfaces where once rain water or run-off could slowly soak in. Lots of reasons.

Building better drainage infrastructure will help, for a while, until urban growth combined with lack of maintenance overwhelms that too.

Or you can do lots of little changes which all add up to make a big change. New developments could feature arrangements to catch and store run-off water. The government has been trying to do this for a while, but they don't have the competence to work out the detail despite the fact that lots of places around the world have been doing it for years. Water butts on every house. More trees and hedgerows to mop water up out of the ground. Living green roofs where practical to act as a big sponge, sucking up rainwater and holding it there until the dry weather comes back and the plants, doing what plants do, drink it up and release it back into the air as fine vapour as the breeze blows over it. On big landscaping projects, more thought as to where rainwater will flow, to encourage more of it to stick around in the soil long enough to be mopped up by the plants or simply evaporate.

The frustrating thing is that all of what I've just said is comparatively cheap, simple, and as close as you'll ever get to zero maintenance. Trouble is, although cheap, its not cheap enough or simple enough to make every householder or land owner do it themselves. It would make sense if there were incentives. Either though government subsidies/grants or maybe if the water companies gave grants or rebates for people that do it. After all, you're saving them in a way by reducing your burden on the infrastructure they are paid to provide.

 

here in Llanelli they have done thishttp://www.dwrcymru.com/en/My-Wastewater/RainScape/RainScape-Llanelli.aspx and i have to say for all the rain we have had in the area that has already been completed we have not as yet experienced one flood, normally i can think of 6 areas that would be flooded just with average rain fall never mind what we have experienced this last 8 weeks, in the areas that havent been completed they have Flooded and then some

 

Reason for delays given here http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-25676973

 

isnt it??? !!!!
and here the rates are half of what is over the boarder

 

This weather is unprecedented in our time, there is NO quick fix.
No one saw it coming.
I don't think a few water buts and living roofs would help much......
It may never happen again or as it seems climate change may have more surprises for us.
At least it has stirred the politicians into getting out their Hunter willies.

 

I don't understand why people keep saying this. Its not unprecedented. The word 'unprecedented' means 'without precedent' or 'has never happened before'. It has, many times. Of course we saw it coming. Its happened in the past and we've been constantly told over many years to expect it again with increasing frequency.

And as for means of capturing it, simple tricks can work. People often look at floods and think there's no way you could capture all that water, but often overlook that the area under water is only a tiny fraction of the area that that water was collected over. Last year, a small area of Redcar flooded. We're lucky, we don't get it that bad because of our geography, but we get a bit now and then. The water that filled up a junction of four roads and a few houses was the result of rainfall falling as far afield as the hills about 20 miles away, overwhelming the drains which come right through Redcar on their way out to sea. Something as simple as a water butt for every house in the catchment area would have meant that the drains would not have been overwhelmed, they would not have overflowed, and Redcar would have seen nothing more than a couple of little puddles.

Granted, in the current situation Somerset would probably still have flooded, but would it have flooded as badly?

 

It IS unprecedented in this country....FACT.
Well I can't remember anything on this scale and it will be with those poor souls in the south for many months and the aftermath for years, not just floods but sheer devastation
FACTS.

 

Just a few:

http://www.floods.co.uk/Major_UK_Floods.htm

I'm sure the people that lost everything in 2007, nearly 7 years ago, will be pleased to know they imagined it.

 

Granted that it's been double the normal rainfall for January, which is a record breaker, but we still have...

1948
1968
2000
2007

 

I recon that it'll be another week before the Government declare a National State of Emergency or similar.

The transport network is falling apart, we don't know where the next sinkhole will appear, half of the coastline is slipping into the sea, the land is so saturated that it would only take one earthquake for liquifaction to occur, the weight of the entire British Isles has increased so much that the crust could sag.......

Need I go on?

 

They opened up a bore hole yesterday on the news.
The lid came off and water poured out, the underground aquifers, in places, are full to bursting, they is no longer any absorption going on in the ground, so all new rain only adds to floods and run off.
Until it stops raining there is not much anyone can do.

We live in a BSE society, (blame somebody else), it all stems from the nanny state, if there is a problem the first thought is not how to sort it out, its to find someone to blame.
It dont help the situation, but it makes people feel a lot better, knowing they have someone to have a go at.
Personally, I blame God, he sent the last big flood, and look at the mess that caused.

 

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/201...nds-lash-britain_n_4776351.html?ncid=webmail1