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I’m sure the ea are as frustrated as those on here regarding land management practice (that they don’t control) and development on floodplains etc. They’re the poor souls who have to go stick a plaster on when it goes wrong then get the blame. Regarding clearing ditches etc it’s usually the landowners who are required to keep their ditches clear etc. Many don’t as they don’t have the manpower going spare that they had in the 60s.
Also, straightened rivers that are disconnected from their floodplains send water downstream faster and erode quicker exacerbating the problem. Same as smoothed out floodplains and land up in watersheds. It’s not the EA, we’ve all bu##ered it up.
When I say “we” I mean farmers and developers. (I’m neither).
For the record, I’ve twenty years’ experience of working with the Environment Agency
20+ plus years myself, know every gauging station, sluice in my area. And not all sluices run on telemetry and lot are still on manual operation. And nearly every one of them has been open since September trying to get rid of floodwater.
And for your information, Slackalice landowners have a lot of responsibility of watercourses.
Owning a watercourse
EA have an impossible job, with little control over the main factors, no one notices when it works, want heads on spikes when it doesn't.
And it's that sort of blame seeking attitude that is the biggest problem
I'd be the first to admit the EA is not perfect, far from it.
The majority of people are doing their best, especially op's field teams who are out there in the shitty weather night and day getting no praise for their hard effort and often overshadowed by the fire brigade or the army turning up.
Stupid question time.....I appreciate it might not even assist by 1% but why don't the 'authorities' drastically lower reservoir water levels when heavy rain is pretty much certain?
Around Hebden Bridge are several moorland reservoirs with their respective catchment areas.
According to kuco's post above, they have.
Dave, because they supply water for drinking etc. Mini reservoirs have been put in place though, Todmorden park has a river down the side and sluice gates at either end, the park is bunded. They can open the top gates at peak times and divert some of the flow into the park storing it until river levels drop and it can be released slowly. Flooding causes vary, in Calderdale it's not building on flood plains, it's the speed the water comes down off the hills. The town's have flooded for years, my neighbours left Tod 20 years ago due to the flooding. Realistically were are going to have to retreat from the river basin, trouble is many of the Victorian town centres run a long the rivers. It was interesting driving through Padiham this week, it flooded in 2015, some shops had invested in flood defences, others relied on shopping bags filled with sand. People in the flood prone areas do need to take some responsibility. Stupid thing is the insurance companies won't pay a little extra for flood proofing when they pay out a claim, would save them a lot in the long run.
The flood defences they built round here are basically reservoirs that only fill when flow levels significantly increase. Quite impressive to see when they are in operation tbh.
I’m sure many flood defences are worth having but is it really worth a multi million ££ investment to stop the flooding of half a dozen properties!?
No, it is worth it to protect thousands of homes, business and infrastructure for that area though.
Calderdale it’s not building on flood plains, it’s the speed the water comes down off the hills.
We need more beaver!!
@dave661350
Yorkshire water began drawing down the reservoir capacity above the hebden water this January. Took four years of discussion and planning, in part I assume because the catchment dynamics are complex and it needs a bit of thought, in part perhaps because they are reluctant to reach spring/summer with lower capacity. How far they got with drawing down I'm not sure, but lower gorple Res. Was full last week. In hebden at least, a large part of the problem lies with flash run off over farmland running rapidly down road system overwhelming the drainage system, filling the canal which then overflows into the town centre. I'm no expert, but the EA doesnt have the teeth or the resources to deal with the physical problems or powerful interests. Our infrastructure is a disconnected shambles, basically. Right, I'm off now to move the dehumidifiers out of my mum's wrecked flat as it's likely that it'll be underwater again tonight.
It feels like it needs a whole new approach. Any localised flood defences simply move the issue up or downstream. Wouldn't it make sense to go left-field, the 'island' row of terrace houses in Mytholmroyd opposite the Coop for example...White Houses. Remove them ? Could many of the regularly flooded houses be adapted so the ground floor is effectively a waterproofed 'cellar' and develop a lightweight 2nd floor to add extra space. Failing that, linking in with insurance firms and simply demolishing dozens of houses and re-building them to be flood proof.
It all feels like we keep replacing the sticking plaster and never look at the fact that we won't beat this issue into submission, we need to work with it.
A canal, a road, a river and a railway in a valley in places just 100 feet wide was always going to be a problem (I live over the hill and worked in HB for 10 years 20 yrs ago so know the issues well)
I was typing as you posted gallowayboy. Thanks for that.
In hebden at least, a large part of the problem lies with flash run off over farmland
And not just Hebden, I live in Heptonstall, which at 280m above sea level you'd have thought would be safe. But this issue causes my house to flood pretty much every time there is heavier than normal rainfall over an extended period of 24-48 hours. It's nothing to do with heather burn off or beavers or anything, it's about a decayed water management infrastructure that's been left so long it's no longer repairable by individual landowners. I'm pretty sure the woman who owns the field above me would like nothing more than to repair the land drains and so on, but I'm pretty sure the reason she doesn't is the cost.
anyway, I've been flooded 3 times in the last 5 years, I'm sat here expecting to be flooded again after last weekend, it's pretty much the main reason I'm leaving as soon as I can.
I have wondered for a few years why it isn't a condition of the planning permission in flood risk areas for new builds to be elevated 1-2 feet off the ground, to help reduce the chance of flooding. If houses are to be built in flood plains surely this is a logical & reasonable requirement?
Is anyone able to shed some light on this for me?
I have wondered for a few years why it isn’t a condition of the planning permission in flood risk areas for new builds to be elevated 1-2 feet off the ground, to help reduce the chance of flooding. If houses are to be built in flood plains surely this is a logical & reasonable requirement?
Is anyone able to shed some light on this for me?
It makes sense to do the above, maybe elevate a metre or two for full(ish) protection.
Got involved in converting an old reservoir tank into houses. Basically the “underground” section contained the garages, with utility rooms. The washing machines / dryers etc were installed a metre off the ground. The garages had a sump and a pump in the corner. These lower areas were fully tanked. New owners were told not to convert the garages into additional living areas as they may be liable to flooding.
So , surely the simplest solution is to build townhouse type dwellings with ground floor garages that can have watertight garage doors, tanked and with sumps / pumps in case the worst happens.
All that doesn't sound very inclusive of disability. *
* Tongue in cheek but half truth. My current house is 4 ft off ground level.
During planning for building work I Had all sorts of diasilibity hoops to jump.through despite there being 5 steps to get up at either side of the house to get inside and 22 steps to the bedrooms
How ever your idea is what they do in other parts of the world regularly.
It’s nothing to do with heather burn off or beavers or anything, it’s about a decayed water management infrastructure
How do you know? Whats growing the the fields makes a massive difference to run off.
How do you know?
Are you ****ing serious?
All that doesn’t sound very inclusive of disability. *
Interesting point . What are the requirements to cater for disabilities when building new houses for the general public ? I’m guessing very little.
revs - quite a lot.
Downstairs toilet, accessible switches and sockets are two I can think of.
And probably space, look at the space taken up by a house in a modern development, now imagine the additional space required if the house is elevated by x and a wheelchair ramp to access the property is built. No developer is gong to do anything of the sort until they are mandated to.
Why haven't they been? Well that's a question for you councillors/planning/MP to be answering.
Population growth and increasing hard surfacing innit?
Are you **** serious?
Yep, do you have much understanding of what causes run off?
I have wondered for a few years why it isn’t a condition of the planning permission in flood risk areas for new builds to be elevated 1-2 feet off the ground, to help reduce the chance of flooding. If houses are to be built in flood plains surely this is a logical & reasonable requirement?Is anyone able to shed some light on this for me?
Becasue as mentioned above by a couple of different people, there is zero joined-up thinking. The cash-strapped council want to sell some land to a developer. The developer wants to build houses as cheaply and quickly as possible, sell them and move on to the next project. Asking them to build them on stilts or add in a shedload of flood defences adds to the cost which is passed on to the buyer. Everyone wants things on the cheap, including the buyer.
Once they're bought, the developers can deny all responsibility for flooding, passing the buck to the poor EA and to the insurers.
And the more you build (even dozens of miles away) the more concrete there is, the more water runs off it rather than sitting on/in the ground and the worse the problem gets elsewhere. Couple that with run-off from farms and fields, straightened watercourses, poor maintenance of drains/ditches/culverts, more extreme weather due to climate change and (in certain cases) flood defences in one place pushing the problem downstream.
The Government has absolutely no strategic plan for transport, housing (and the related infrastructure like roads, public transport, utilities, schools...), it's all just a hotch-potch of half-related schemes that are usually done as "sticking plaster" reactive solutions.
We built a housing estate but now that local road is gridlocked, we'd best build a bypass.
We built the bypass but now someone has come along and built an out-of-town shopping centre on it so traffic is back to previous levels.
Now we need more housing to cope with demand so we'll build down here.
Oops, building down here means that over there now floods, we'll build some defences.
It's all just one massive merry-go-round of attempting to fix previous ****-ups without ever learning from any of it.
I have wondered for a few years why it isn’t a condition of the planning permission in flood risk areas for new builds to be elevated 1-2 feet off the ground, to help reduce the chance of flooding.
So it sort of is, but (there's always a but) it doesn't always work for a couple of reasons. The developer will be expected to undertake flood risks assessments, overland flow analysis, etc. To show that flooding under certain scenarios is a sufficiently low risk. If it is then raising the development platform, implementing catchment ponds, etc. Can be put in place as mitigation.
Problem 1: The consultant doing the work may do a bare minimum quick job on low fees which reduces the level of robustness of the modelling.
Problem 2: Guidance documentation is out of date and uses historical weather files and/or assumptions on climate change rather than science based predictions on likely emissions scenarios.
Problem 3: The EA and others are massively underfunded so struggle to bring revised guidance forward quick enough meaning a huge time lag between the latest predictions on climate change and published guidance. The EA released additional climate change predictions at the end of last year based on a near worst case emissions scenario, but this still used findings from UKCP09 which is over 10years old rather than UKCP18 (note: this isn't the EA's fault, again it comes down to time to undertake work, funding, etc.).
Problem 4: The Local Authority in most cases will also be under funded and under staffed with people of sufficient technical knowledge to review planning submissions properly.
Problem 5: There is a huge pressure on nearly all Local Authorities to provide more housing.
Problem 6: I mentioned this earlier in the thread but it's the owner/insurer that pays when it all goes wrong - there's typically no clear link back to the developer. It'll be interesting to see if this changes though.
Problem 7: We still consider developments on a plot by plot basis. There may be flood maps for an area but there isn't and overall 'masterplan' type approach for water management in a lot of areas.
That's just everything I can think of over the period of a cup of tea, but admittedly I'm giving a talk on climate resilience in a few weeks! One of my key points will be that we (those in consultancy, etc.) need to start putting a hell of a lot more pressure on government to drive change in this area.
Ahhhh… so do those credentials make you a….? 😉
They make me someone who can rely on their own experience rather than the emetic outpourings of a keyboard warrior.
@honeybadgerx - your response is considerably more detailed but yes, looks like we were typing basically the same stuff at the same time!
Ransos, may have experience coming out of his fundament, but as far as the Somerset Levels are concerned, the EA officer in charge of the region decided that the local rivers authorities were no longer needed, and all river dredging was stopped, allowing the rivers to silt up, in one case the river’s carrying capacity was reduced to roughly 30%, which meant that even a small increase in rainfall, added to by increased runoff from the surrounding moorland, caused significant flooding. This was a deliberate policy aimed at returning farmland that had been in use for around 1000 years by monks from Glastonbury building the networks of ditches to drain the salt marshes to wildlife-friendly marsh.
Ignoring, of course, that this drastically affected the livelihood of many, many people.
He no longer has the job, the local river authorities have been reinstated and the dredging has been carried out. Oddly enough, there has been little to no significant flooding in the area since locals with relevant knowledge of their environment have had control, and not the EA.
Now, you may well consider yourself an expert, so did the bloke who no longer has a job in that region; but it’s funny that while an ‘expert’ was involved there was catastrophic flooding that in some places didn’t disappear for six months, and now the ‘expert’ has gone, and the locals, who by your estimation are ignorant, have taken over, the flooding doesn’t happen.
Still, what’s generations of local knowledge stretching back a thousand years compared to someone with twenty years, eh?
#eyeroll
Just as an example, this is a bridge over one of the main rivers. At the sides of the main structure can be seen two partial holes, they’re designed to allow water to continue to flow even when the river is at a high level, rather than backing up at the sides and overflowing the banks.
This photo shows the result of EA’s decision to stop dredging, the result of which should be obvious to anyone who isn’t a complete idiot.
This old photo shows what it should look like:
Now, you may well consider yourself an expert,
I've never claimed anything of the sort. What I do know is that dredging is very high cost for limited benefit, which ultimately is why it has been cut back as funding has reduced. I also know that correlation is not causation as I'm not a Tory minister nor a keyboard warrior.
Ultimately, people need to accept the need for better preventive measures, perhaps of the kind that have been deployed in the Stroud valleys.
Countzero, are you sure those holes are to allow flow? It's not uncommon for masonry arch bridges to have the haunches lightened by putting holes in - like this one in Pontypridd.
Too heavy haunches can cause collapse by pushing the drown of the arch upwards.
I imagine people in Calderdale would like an interventionist government, a government that takes northern voters seriously, a properly funded local authority that could manage water and stand up to confront inappropriate building developments and landowners burning off the ground to improve their shooting businesses. So what do they do? Elect a Tory MP. Try to explain that whilst keeping a straight face.
Countzero, are you sure those holes are to allow flow? It’s not uncommon for masonry arch bridges to have the haunches lightened by putting holes in – like this one in Pontypridd.
Given the capacity of them and the design/location I doubt they would have a measurable impact on flow at all.
I love the rosey view of history on here; the dykes which have been maintained for thousands of years; the bits of Somerset which have only flooded since the inception of the EA etc
You don’t have to look back long to see the floods caused by badly maintained sluices collapsing or getting stuck (There are plenty of examples in the last hundred years). Historically improvements and maintenance drives only happened when the local landowners houses or their commercial interests were threatened. Increasingly wealth has little to do with local interests and responsibility is firmly with government bodies.
The EA have an impossible job and crap funding for what they’re expected to do. Like a lot of centrally funded organisations local responsibility is seen as a route to ‘bigger and better things’ as soon as someone gets the hang of it they’re promoted and moved. Why would people stay around in a job where they can see there is work which needs to be done but don’t have the funds (or the prospect of funds) to do it and they know they will be blamed when the inevitable happens?
The EA take the blame for local planning decisions they have little influence over, or where they do they are over ridden from above because ’strategic’ and commercial interests overrides common sense/local knowledge.
Perhaps the answer is for more devolved regional taxation and organisation so local concerns can be addressed.
I think the need to blame someone/something is a very natural human response.
Since we've killed off God, he gets off the hook for all these things happening. It was one of those useful human needs that religion met that we don't have any more and haven't found a replacement for.
Since we’ve killed off God, he gets off the hook for all these things happening. It was one of those useful human needs that religion met that we don’t have any more and haven’t found a replacement for.
That really would explain a lot about modern society
Lots of Americans still do religion.
Nevertheless, there seems to be a culture of blame and suing for damages going on there.
Fair point, well made. Carry on!
Lots of Americans still do
religion.blaming everyone but themselves and taking no responsibility for screwing over the world as long as they keep 'merica great...
FTFY
Countzero, are you sure those holes are to allow flow? It’s not uncommon for masonry arch bridges to have the haunches lightened by putting holes in – like this one in Pontypridd.
Is it a myth then that the name of the town came from the fact they paid someone to build a bridge and it got washed away repeatedly so they had to build it again until they built a proper stone one with the aforementioned channels? I grew up in Wales and that was taught in school as a moral tale of some sort about doing things right first time.
I've heard the engineering explanation as well, usually with the context of why lots of bridges are actually hollow structures, the ones with holes in them are just the more obvious examples.
Sometimes it seem we (Brits) go out of our way to encourage flooding. We build houses where perhaps it's not wise, we remove natural defences to it and of course along with the rest of the world go ****ing about with the environment so we get more storms.
If it was one 'thing' it would be easy to fix, but it's not - and for Half-arsed Britain the problem is, the proper solution is probably expensive, time consuming, complex and inconvenient to us. So, rather than do that, we'll build some higher walls and forget about it for a while because well, it only floods in unusual places now and again and the usual places - well, it always floods there, so it's the people who live there's fault.
If it was one ‘thing’ it would be easy to fix, but it’s not – and for Half-arsed Britain the problem is, the proper solution is probably expensive, time consuming, complex and inconvenient to us.
^^ This. Everything now has to be portrayed in simplistic soundbite form. Media & clickbait friendly.
"The problem is xxx"
But that's nowhere near the truth, there are multiple factors feeding into various circumstances, scenarios and probabilities but no-one wants to consider that. The media just want someone they can interview in a shouty confrontational way, the public want an easy blame option, the Government want to deny everything...
So half-arsed Britain half does another half way house "solution" that sounds good in the press and the circle of failures continues.
I used to live in York. It floods. Regularly. They spent a lot of time and money to create an upstream flood defence (Clifton Ings). When the river rises, you flood the Ings and hopefully you get some control.. So York still floods. However downstream, Selby, does not flood. So the TV shows the flooding in York, when there is a success story.
We cannot stop flooding, we can only mitigate it. Areas that have flooded will continue to flood. We cannot control the rainfall, especially events like Carina and Dennis so close together. Until we accept that we will just throw money at it (or not), which is mostly pointless.
If you want something to happen the EA would need real teeth and a lot of money. It would need to be able to compel land owners to keep the ditches and land drains clear. It would need to compel land owners to turn heather moors into forests. It would have to be able to stop Local Authorities from granting planning permission from flood risk areas. It would give them powers to turn flood ares full of development into flood plains. And they would need enough money to keep existing rivers etc clear. Just not going to happen. Far easier to beat them up every few years.