These floods.

[cromwell]

It is Gal, yes. Deforestation of hill sides also increases the risk of landslips in some places.

In Mytholmroyd, which flooded again this week, planning permission has been granted for houses on the valley sides above the town, which isn't good. Building on flood plains isn't a bright idea either. The last government wanted to build a new city just south of Selby. all that area has been underwater this week!

I used to go to Cawood for a walk in the winter to blow the cobwebs away. It would be hard walking on that riverbank now, it's under about 10 feet of water; even the bridge was under water. And poor Tadcaster! The collapsed bridge there used to carry the main road to York, it goes right through the middle of town. They are going to have some pain on until the bridge is rebuilt.

[Workingman]

A brilliant article, Gal, and it has been interesting to hear the views of practical people and interested amateurs being put up against the "book learning" of the Environment Agency's experts in the past few days.

It has got to the point where DEFRA and the EA have admitted that a 'complete rethink' is necessary - better late than never! However, we should not pretend that there is a quick fix. The industrialisation of farming, and all that entails, has been going on since WWII, and it will take a lot of work to undo the worst of the damage.

The bridge at Tadcaster is a disaster for the town and a community of about 10km square. There is nowhere local to erect a temporary bridge and the only option to get to the other side is an 11km trip to either Boston Spa one way or Bilbrough on the A64 the other. Getting goods and services to the eaast side of Tadcaster is going to be a nightmare unless there is some temporary road layout where the A659 runs in to the A64.

The route through Boston spa is not suitable for anything much bigger than a Transit and it is not much better at Bilbrough - maybe a 7 tonner.

[Suff]

The succinct part of this is simple.

So what's it all about - and why weren't the flood defences up to the job? Actually, it's surprisingly simple. A lot of rain fell. More rain than has ever fallen anywhere in the UK before in a 24-hour period.

A warmer climate allows the atmosphere to hold more water. When that water falls, it falls faster and for longer. Also there is a huge El Nino building in the Pacific. This has muted the Atlantic hurricane season, but the warm evaporating water has to go somewhere. This year it was us. Another year it will be somewhere else.

I was working in Turin at the time of the Po valley flooding in 2000. I drove to Milan to take the plane home and I drove through rain which I had never seen before. It was more like driving through a swimming pool than through rain, at times at least 4 inches was sitting on the road.

When I got back on the Sunday, I could not get back on the Autostrada and had to divert which took me 4 hours. It was not until Monday that I found out why. The massive 6 lane Autostrada bridge had gone 100m South and all other bridges within 100km were also out of action. In Turin itself there were brown street lamps where the muddy water had entered the glass. The Fiat building where they used to do the foundry work in the 1930's had been lifted off it's foundations and there was devastation all over the place. When I drove up the valley the next weekend to head for Sweden, it looked like the path of a hurricane had gone up the valley, train embankments washed out, Autostrada washed out.

I've read articles since which try to explain it all away and say it's river banks and not global warming. However the reality at the time, when everyone didn't realise the cost of mitigating global warming and so were not trying to deny it, was that it usually rained to 1,500m and snowed above. This whole weekend it had rained up to 3,000m and had brought down massive landslides and, much more damaging, rock slides. These rock slides were carried down by the raging river and destroyed everything in it's path. Retaining walls for flood barriers, houses, bridge founds, everything. Some of the rocks were 5m across, I saw them trying to move them when I drove North through the valley.

Whilst it's good to talk about land stabilisation and ecology, we are going to have to go much, much further than that. Right now the environment is more like 15,000 years ago and in the next 50 years is going to be more like 800,000 years ago. To deal with this we are going to have to do the same review of the water infrastructure that the Victorians did, but with an eye to the current situation. For instance we're going to have to re-do the Thames Barrier within 100 years. It simply won't cope with the rising sea levels and increased storms. When it does go, the old scenes of London flooding I remember will be a fond memory, because when it does go the resulting flood is going to be catastrophic.

It took humans 2,000 years to tame the river Rhone and it was only achieved by the implementation of cascaded barriers designed to deal with the flood conditions. Something similar is going to have to be done for the watersheds of the UK and it is NOT going to be cheap.

The world was told, in the 1990's, that the cost of avoiding climate change was going to be incredibly expensive and that every decade we did not do it, the cost would become higher. However the world was also told that the cost of NOT avoiding climate change would be paid in lives, lost land, lost countries and devastation on a scale the human race had never been seen before.

So we chose not to avoid. What we see now are the first warming up sounds of the orchestra. When we are in full symphony it will be incredible to see. But nobody will be enjoying it much....

[Workingman]

There are plenty of articles being resurrected from decades past. Many of them are from people who were farming the land and fishing the rivers, as well as environmentalists, and a lot of them say the same things: "If you do 'this' here, then 'these things' will happen over there forty of fifty years down the line". Well 'these things' are now happening 'over there' and were predicted. Unfortunately the government, Met Office and EA are using the tired old excuse of unprecedented rainfall "since records began" as the excuse.

Yes, global warming/climate change, the latitude of the jetstream, El Nino and the failure of the Siberian high are having an impact, but there are a lot of other 'man made' factors to take into account. Blaming everything on the weather is too easy a get-out for the politicians.

[cromwell]

I agree with the complete rethink about flood management. The point I would like to make is that I would like the complete rethink to be done by someone other than the Environment Agency, who seem to be pretty clueless.

[Workingman]

I was watching BBC news earlier when a wet-behind-the-ears expert was spouting the same mantra: More money for flood defences, more to be done to flood-proof homes, more, more, and more of the same old - same old.

There was not one word, not one, about the oversight of land and river usage. No analysis or questions about what might have gone wrong or how to attempt to put things right.

[cromwell]

I suppose that there is big money to be made in new flood defences and maybe not much to be made in land management and unblocking drains? Most things are a money racket in this country nowadays.

One thing struck me today when I was watching the news from Tadcaster. The army had built a solid platform so that the river and the bridge could be inspected. Good job they were there because I can't see the EA being able to do that!

[Workingman]

The point I would like to make is that I would like the complete rethink to be done by someone other than the Environment Agency, who seem to be pretty clueless.

You are not the only one making the point. It has even been made by some MPs and those in local government; now who would have thought?

[medsec222]

I think a lot of people in well paid government jobs have a lazy approach to the way they do their jobs. As long as things seem to be ticking over they are quite happy to draw their salaries and blame outside influences when things go wrong.

[Workingman]

I think a lot of people in well paid government jobs have a lazy approach to the way they do their jobs. As long as things seem to be ticking over they are quite happy to draw their salaries and blame outside influences when things go wrong.

Nail. Head. Hit!