ThePickards
standards, accessibility, and ranting and general stuff by the web chemist

Flooding for the U.K it’s raining all the time and maybe
I sit in a boat watch the traffic float
your future dream is a choppy stream cos I
want to be … a meterologist

With my humblest apologies to the Sex Pistols.

When I was sking for blog postings to talk about the other day, Paul pointed me in the direction of Polly Toynbee’s piece for the Guardian If Chelsea were under water it would be taken seriously. As she points out, despite it receiving national news coverage, we’ve got seven people dead, and 27,000 homes flooded, whereas if the Thames had burst its banks even ever so slightly it would probably have been declared a state of emergency.

This is for two main reasons. Firstly, it is my opinion that there is a geographic bias towards the South East. I don’t just mean in the media; I mean the media, business, government and so on. Secondly (and closely related) the South East is where the media and the government happen to be, so naturally stuff not on their doorsteps isn’t as important as stuff that is.

I’d dispute Polly’s title however: if Chelsea was under three feet of water, it would only be taken seriously by the media, government and other South-Easterners. The rest of us people out in the regional backwaters would be chortling over their cornflakes about it.

But the whole question of flooding did raise it’s head recently. A family member was away on holiday in Italy and phoned to ask if we’d been having any flooding problems. We hadn’t.

Given that we live (if my reading of the OS maps is correct) about 128m above sea level, and at the top of a hill, I would be quite surprised if we suffered from flooding. In fact, I would go as far as to say that if our house was threatened by the Tyne having burst its banks, then you’d probably find most of Britain was in fact already underwater.

So no, I haven’t personally experienced the flooding. I did note the rain however, in what appears to be the monsoon climate we’re rapidly developing.

Flooding always generates a lot of contradictory thoughts:

• Why don’t any of these people have insurance?
• Oh right, many of them can’t afford it. Fair dos.
• Whaddya mean they can’t afford insurance? They’ve got a bigger telly than we have. Although theirs is somewhat damp…
• Hang on, so my taxes are going to have to go to help out people who were living on a flood plain in the first place? Why not live on a hill, instead?
• Oh right, I do understand that not everyone necessarily has a choice
• …but if we help them out this time can we ask that they move somewhere more sensible?

And that’s really the problem. I don’t mind the idea of the Great British Taxpayer helping to pay for families who’ve lost everything, who were unable to afford housing that wasn’t likely to flood, and couldn’t afford insurance. I do however object to paying out for people who could afford insurance but chose not to on the grounds it would mean they couldn’t also afford that HD-TV, or to people who’ve deliberately bought some luxury riverside flat because they want to be near to the water: you are even nearer the water now, so stop complaining!

I’m not actually quite as harsh as that, to be honest but bumbling along some kind of middle route wouldn’t have made for a particularly interesting blog post, so I thought I’d take a firm line…

And it does rather beg the question: so why build houses on areas subject to flooding then?

But maybe that’s evidence of my geographic bias. I’m from Gateshead in the North East of England. Gateshead is basically a mixture of hills and valleys. There are one or two small flat bits, but in general to get from point A to point B, you’re going to have to go either uphill or downhill. This is what I’m used to; this is what I grew up with.

I vaguely recall from living in London that things were different there: it was boringly flat.

When you get hilly areas of the country, you’re going to find many people are elevated significantly above any small areas of potential flood plain. Where you get large flat expanses of country, you’re going to find that that large flat expanse of country pretty much is the flood plain.

And there is the crux of the problem: it’s not that places don’t have good enough flood defences; it’s not that it’s been raining too much; it’s not that our weather forecasting and planning isn’t sophisticated enough (witness the forecasting powers of the magical if inexplicable Weather Stone to realise where we might be going wrong), it’s simply that certain parts of the country aren’t hilly enough.

I’d therefore like to urge the government to legislate for more hills to be introduced across the country as soon as possible to minimise the consequences of further flooding, with a range of snow-capped mountains to be introduced in Norfolk by 2015.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 8th, 2007 at 6:10 am and is filed under Life. You can follow responses via my RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your site.