Vocal Voices

Says Tim Farron.

Well Mr Farron, you and your merry band made an incredibly strong case for 12bn in foreign aid and also a huge case for not cutting any sort of benefits and keeping a huge bunch of subsidies.

Now you know the cost. Personally!

I saw a wonk from the Environment Agency, something to do with river management, explaining what happened in Keswick. The river used to break its banks fairly often causing flood that were "inconvenient", so they built a 3ft wall. The next time the river broke over the wall and the floods were worse, so they put glass panels on the wall. This time the river broke over the glass panels and the flood are the worst ever. Nothing was mentioned about doing things to allow the river to flow or measures to keep the rains from draining away so quickly.

Then came the genius bit: water tends to find its own level.

Follow the logic. If a river breaks a bank 9in above its normal level the initial flood will be at 9in. Build a 3ft wall and the floods rise to 3ft, and on it goes. Flood defences are only one part of a river's management system, we have forgotten that.

We have to start spending money on our own infrastructure and less on foreign aid. Maintaining things like grates, drains and sewers might not be glamorous but it is necessary.

We have some of the poorest roads in Europe, basically cart tracks with tarmac on them, and we are still living mainly on a Victorian inheritance of railways, sewers and so on.

A lot of money has been spent in Cumbria but obviously not very effectively!

I really feel for those poor people who have been flooded out three times in ten years, it's too much.

It does seem that our water management sense has gone out of the window. We used to be second in the world to the Dutch about water and river management. Now we're just a bunch of idiots doing piecemeal work and hoping it will solve the problem.

I blame silo thinking and budgets which are constrained by other "critical" services. You know like ensuring that council forms are available in every language on the planet and interpreters are available for Martian and Venusian dialects.

Come to France. Forms are available in French and French and French. Can't fill them in? Find someone who can help you! Oddly enough France is one of the Architects of the current EU system and the EU HRA.

Until our government gets its head screwed on the right way round, these events are going to keep on happening and certain elements of the government are going to look for someone else to blame. I wonder what they are going to say when the Thames Barrier meets the 10,000 year storm?

There was a time when farmers would keep culverts, sluices, goits and soakaways in tip-top condition because it was to benefit them, their crops and livestock. Those days are gone. We now have industrialised food production; and management of the land and rivers has been handed over to "professional" managers.

I know the last few days have seen exceptional rains, but in previous years the rains were in the normal range yet the devastation was exceptional.

Something is not working, but to blame everything on budgets and flood defences are far too easy sound-bite answers. TPTB need to take a good look at this whole environmental management thing, and do it with open minds.

The government should divert monies from the Overseas Aid budget to ensure that homes in this country are properly protected from flooding. The majority of flood victims are no doubt taxpayers, who see their hard-earned money earmarked for aid to other countries, whilst they are left to clear up the mess at home caused by inadequate flood defences.

I do agree with Cromwell and Meds about foreign aid, but money is only a part of the problem.

Very little has been done in the past few decades to get rivers to do what they do best - flow to the sea.

Hemming them in when they do break their banks, a normal way of life for rivers, seems to be the only option on the books. The problem is that doing so often pushes the problem somewhere else and most often to a place where it would not naturally happen.

Let us not forget where they build nowadays. I wonder how old these houses are?

Where I grew up in Lincolnshire, I went to school every day over the river Witham. Often I saw the Witham within 6 inches of the 10 foot banks. Often, at those times, we heard that there was flooding downstream of the high banks.

In the 80's, the land boom saw developers building on the field land which had been the overspill of the Witham.

Not hard to do the math....

Whilst the climate is changing and weather events are becoming more severe (including the gradient between severity flips, flood to drought and the opposite), also we are making the consequences of that more severe weather greater by building where the water most easily goes and then not putting in defences to protect the property from that water.

It's not all a one way street leading to government priorities. But a lot of it is.

I only partly agree.

Take a virgin river with a natural choke point at C. During flood conditions it breaks its banks upstream at B - the flood plain. Further upstream A is unaffected.

Move on in time and houses are built adjacent to B. In time it floods in its natural way and the cry goes out to protect the properties. OK, the properties should never have been built there in the first place, but they have. Expensive flood defences are put in place to stop floods at B and the properties are saved, but because the problem is pushed upstream point A now becomes vulnerable.

Next we get an exceptional flood. Had the defences at B not been in place the natural flood plain would have dealt with the problem. However, they are in place so the problem moves upstream to point A. This has never been a flood area, so when it is breached the floods cover land never before flooded, and then the waters move down to the natural flood plain.

We have seen this in Lewes, Somerset and Gloucestershire and no lessons have been learned.

It has never occurred to the professional environmental managers to alleviate things by removal or control of the original choke point(s) downstream.

It is not a budget problem, it is a problem solving problem.

Ah but I understand that £5,000 is being given to householders many of whom have lost everything by this generous government.. What a bunch of wasters we have running this country. Farmers losing livestock, homes for the second time being destroyed. People wish to move, property valueless. Foreign Aid being thrown in every direction being more often than not landing up in the wrong people's pockets . This country of ours has fallen apart.