I don’t believe dredging the river Parrett would make much difference to the flooding on the levels, aside from a small increase in the river’s capacity as a short-term reservoir. The amount of flow is very limited due to the small drop to mean sea level, and the tidal nature of the river means that for a significant part of the day there is effectively no outflow, and for some of it there’s a flow inwards. That could maybe be helped by some downriver sluices but really the levels are flooded because there has been a lot of rain.

The EA have reduced the amount of dredging they do. This was for environmental reasons.They did not put any other measures in place to compensate for the reduced capacity of the rivers.

We have just had very high levels of rain and the flooding has been worse than it would of been 20 years ago because of this. It would of flooded but not like this.

I blame the EA. Seem to have lost the plot.

more trees everywhere its got to be a win win for everyone

More trees in upland areas is where they should be. Our intellectually-challenged environment minister had a brief bout of understanding this earlier in the week but was back to the “party-line” once Dave had spoken on the issue.
There is no quick fix, which the Westminster clowns can use so they lose interest in doing it properly.

Yes, the EA came under the control of “environmentalists” who were more concerned about saving the river oysters and little birdies, than assisting the farmers in maintaining their businesses and the local populace to live in safer conditions. That’s why the dredging stopped.

There’s a similar move being made in Cumbria to force the hill farmers off the land so it can return to what it might have been like 3,000 years ago, by a bunch of town-dwelling green obsessives who make a comfortable living for themselves elsewhere.

Michael Eavis:

http://www.sheptonmalletjournal.co.uk/Glastonbury-Festival-s-Michael-Eavis-calls/story-20528445-detail/story.html

I find it entirely understandable that large numbers of people who’ve had to commute by boat for a month are pretty pissed off and looking for someone to blame. I briefly succumbed myself, threatening to remove a downstream sluice with an axe 🙂 their opinions are newsworthy not because of their validity, but because of human interest. They deserve to be a part of the debate, surely?

As wobbliscott says, the Somerset Levels are a different situation to most river flooding. They are, historically, marshlands that have been reclaimed centuries ago with man-made rivers to manage them. The flooding isn’t due to rivers/water channels over-spilling their banks (as in natural rivers spilling into their flood plains) but because the rivers/water channels cannot cope with the excess rainwater falling onto the land being sluiced and pumped into them. Hence the argument that stopping dredging (effectively reducing the capacity of the rivers/channels) means that water stands for longer on the adjacent land. The locals accept that there will be flooding because of the nature of the area but usually flood water can be dispersed into the rivers/channels within a day or two. Since dredging stopped, the water stands for much longer and, in this instance, for several weeks.

The flooding being experienced elsewhere is for many and various reasons, mostly man made 🙁

You could dredge all the rivers along with all the burns/streams you like but it would make very little difference to the amount of water able to be removed from saturated land, the rainfall we have had is unusual and unprecedented and if the rivers were dredged then we’d have to cope with water flowing at an increased rate which would bring it’s own problems. All according to friend who holds a high position in the BHS.

With respect, is a manager at British Home Stores really that qualified to comment? 😉

I’ll be damned if I can remember where I saw it, but a couple of years ago I came across a very good physical model where you could build conurbations and choose to have straight or windy roads; grass, gravel or tarmac gardens/drives and even the roofing materials. Then you simulated a heavy rainfall and got to see how the water behaved.
Unsurprisingly the optimum scenario was less tarmac and more grass and gravel, and I believe windy roads were better than straight ones.
It’s not just about thinking a little more where to build, but all the other factors that go with that are just as responsible for rainfall management.
Proper planned and sustained dredging makes a positive difference to the land alongside, as does not filling in dykes and ditches to make bigger fields.

Yes, the EA came under the control of “environmentalists” who were more concerned about saving the river oysters and little birdies, than assisting the farmers in maintaining their businesses and the local populace to live in safer conditions. That’s why the dredging stopped.

Well said Mr Woppit.

With respect, is a manager at British Home Stores really that qualified to comment?

😀

It’s a shame the UK is under the jackboot of environmentalists. Won’t someone stand up for the interests of global agribusiness and market solutions?

The comment about people in the EA earning lots ofmoney is Bollocks. They earn an awful lot less than their peers in engineering consulting who do similar work

Dredging argument is a weird one. If the dredged channel can cope with 1 unit of water per hour but its rained so much the previous days that the flow is 2 units per hour then it won’t stop flooding. It’s the same as the idiots who say that flood defences fail when they are overtopped. A 2m defence can’t stop 3m of flooding. (it’s much more complicated than this but I’ve used small words for the benefit of some of the posters above)

Concrete pillars would help reduce the damage if you have to build houses on a flood plain but in extreme floods such as some of the recent ones the volume of boulders or debris moving around inthe flood could easily damage concrete pillars.

konabunny – Member
It’s a shame the UK Environment Agency is under the jackboot influence of environmentalists who are also attacking the National Trust. Won’t someone stand up for the interests of global agribusiness and market solutions local farmers and the surrounding population?

🙄

Kona bunny – I think you’ll see market solutions coming in the next 5 years. Green shoots already starting in east anglia. There’s also a project starting up for the Severn catchment

Dredging argument is a weird one. If the dredged channel can cope with 1 unit of water per hour but its rained so much the previous days that the flow is 2 units per hour then it won’t stop flooding.

No it won’t stop flooding but it will reduce it and allow it clear quicker.

It’s a shame the UK is under the jackboot of environmentalists. Won’t someone stand up for the interests of global agribusiness and market solutions?

That’s not really the case in Somerset is it?

People are living in a managed landscape that used to be marshland but was drained over the years. Now some misguided civil servants have changed how they manage it with some really bad results.

The National Trust? Weren’t you the one slagging off town-dwelling obsessives who make a comfortable living for themselves elsewhere?

Just can’t see the house builders coughing up the money to allow for concrete stilt/pilings. They build to the absolute minimum standards and can barely comply to code standards or building regs so unless government pressure is applied to build this way on flood plains then no chance they will just carry on regardless.

Flooding is a horrendous thing to experience but I’m afraid I’m in the harsh camp, tbh – yes, land and river management policies may have made it worse, and need to be reviewed, but what has flooded before will always flood again. In some ways flood prevention makes things worse by making it less regular and then when it does happen it is apparently a shock, as in Yalding.

I was brought up on the edge of the Fens, our house had a mark from the 1953 floods but had not flooded since, but my parents eventually moved when they saw how close they were getting to having it happen again.

Have mixed views on the Thames Barrier – half of me thinks “sod them”, the other half accepts that because we are so London centric we really would be stuffed if it happened. I’d like to see more stuff being out of London in readiness for the day, because it will happen, and probably in my lifetime.

They need to build more bungahighs.

http://m.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-gloucestershire-25665215

They need to build more bungahighs

In the Levels there aren’t all that many flooded homes, most of them are actually built on relatively high ground. However, I don’t think bungahighs will help get people down a mile of road that’s under 1-2m of filthy water so they can get onto the dry road network and deliver their children to school, themselves to work and get some shopping in.

I never needed much of an excuse to get the jet ski out 😀

I never needed much of an excuse to get the jet ski out

Just the job if you’ve managed to pre-position a car somewhere you can beach the jet ski, and you manage to get there without hitting any fenceposts, submerged cars, dead badgers or random floating debris.

East Anglia hasn’t had the rain that Somerset has and probably won’t. But if a levee/sea wall fails, they will be in a world of hurt.

We’ve already got standing water in playing fields around Cambridge and we’ve had no where near as much water as the South has…..

Strangely, when I were a lad in the 70s, quite large stretches of East Anglia would go under several inches of water every year, and when it had frozen solid they used to hold an annual speed skating contest.

Just cos it hasn’t happened for a few years doesn’t make it a disaster now

Dredging. Doesn’t. Work.

Or to be more accurate, it makes it work for one tiny bit of river then ruins things for everyone downstream. The reason we have floods is due to:

a) Landowners ripping up trees in order to claim subsidies the promote this backwards policy. Start paying the subsidy on forested land and you’re half-way towards solving the problem. Forested land absorbs over 200x more water than pasture.

b) Extensive building work with poor drainage planning over the past 100 years. Unsurprisingly when the water runs directly off the surface, it gets to the river faster.

c) Unusual weather patterns. Might be due to climate change (which is obviously happening), but could equally be coincidence. Sometimes it just rains a lot.

d) Building a house on a flood plain. A fertile flood plain which, as others have pointed out, is only fertile thanks to flooding in the past.

Near me in Suffolk the sea walls have been breached in quite a few places, it’s a bit worse this year than usual but hasn’t caused significant problems.

I have no qualifications on the subject but Suffolk seems to fair pretty well despite being barely above sea level. Possibly something to do with a lot of forestry, relatively little development and being on the east there’s quite a bit less rainfall than the west coast.

Suffolk is basically a desert with a thin layer of soil on top.

People are living in a managed landscape that used to be marshland but was drained over the years. Now some misguided civil servants have changed how they manage it with some really bad results.

And the drainage of the land will have decreased it’s height above mOAD due to peat wastage. Meaning that when the leveed rivers overtop, the water has to flow further downstream to drain off it. Compound this with an area that has a mean mOAD of a few metres and you have no flow. So even a dredged channel would not help once the levees have overtopped. But you know, that’s the environmentalists fault eh.

Mr Woppit – Member
Yes, the EA came under the control of “environmentalists” who were more concerned about saving the river oysters and little birdies, than assisting the farmers in maintaining their businesses and the local populace to live in safer conditions. That’s why the dredging stopped.

There’s a similar move being made in Cumbria to force the hill farmers off the land so it can return to what it might have been like 3,000 years ago, by a bunch of town-dwelling green obsessives who make a comfortable living for themselves elsewhere.

Not sure whether you are a troll or not Woppit… Farmers are ridiculously helped, even when they do not deserve it. The average combinable crop farmer doubles his profits after taxes and drawings have been taken by basic subsidies. Why should taxpayers subsidise profitable industry? I digress from the thread, sorry. Dredging also stopped to direct limited resources to places where it is needed, ie urban areas. You know the economic heartlands of the Country.

I’d like to know who you got your information off re the latter point. It really has made me laugh! Nothing like sensationalism and hyperbole to try and justify a bit of nonsense!

According to BBC, less than 200 homes were actually flooded on the levels, and it would cost £100m to protect / make more resiliant.
Might we be better in some of these areas to abandon…?
😕

Are they still flooded?

Yep

But parts of the levels are still under water and villages cut off 2 months later?

Be cheaper to compulsory purchase all the houses at market rates pre-floods and then just turn the whole area into a reservoir…..

A reservoir. Are you kidding? That land is worth a fortune as paddy fields.

However, I don’t think bungahighs will help get people down a mile of road that’s under 1-2m of filthy water so they can get onto the dry road network and deliver their children to school, themselves to work and get some shopping in.

How much does it cost to build a 1 or 2m high embankment on flat land to run the road along? The Victorians managed to do hundreds of miles of embankments for railways with pick and shovel. Surely raising vulnerable roads a few feet wouldn’t be expensive?

Managed retreat. Its the only way. You cannot keep spending money to keep nature at bay.

The rivers are silting up because they are returning to their natural state. Let them.

The answer is short and harsh. Dont live in an area that floods – and dont place reliance upon an authority carrying out mitigative work forever. This is the case with attenuation ponds, reliance of people to do ‘stuff’ during a flood etc that developers propose as mitigative options in order to get developments through planning – residential dwellings have a design life of 100 years – will the developer be there to manage the attenuation pond in 100 years time or will the flood action plan have been passed from householder to householder – no they won’t

The householders must take some responsibility for choosing to live where they have rather than finger pointing and trying to blame someone else.

Teenrat, don’t talk bollocks, the Dutch have been successfully managing living in a country that’s largely below sea level.
The rivers around there vary, to the north the River Brue which roughly defines the top edge of the Levels, runs past Glastonbury and joins the sea at Highbridge hasn’t flooded and isn’t silted. Why? Because it’s properly managed, and has a tidal gate to stop the sea from bringing silt in at high tide and clogging up the river.
This is why you see no issues in the northern Levels. All that’s needed is for the Tone and Parrat to be managed like they have been since Roman times, by locals who know exactly what needs doing, and for a tidal gate at the mouth of the Parrat like the Brue has, keeping in mind that the Tone joins the Parrat at Burrowbridge, which is the limit of the tidal section of the river.
Given those two provisos, expensive works like building up roads wouldn’t be necessary, because the flooding would be very much more controlled, like it has been for centuries.

The householders must take some responsibility for choosing to live where they have rather than finger pointing and trying to blame someone else.

🙄
Really, do you only read the Daily Mail or The Sun? You do realise these people have been living in the same places for generations! There are farms under water that have never flooded in 150 years! Don’t you grasp what the significance of that is?
They have a legitimate cause to blame someone else; the EA, who scrapped all the local Water Boards twenty years ago, with a commitment to let the rivers flood for environmental reasons.
They talk about costs of dredging, yet spend £22million pounds on a nature reserve at Steart Point, how does that make sense?
Maybe you ought to visit the Nederlands, and lecture them about living somewhere that would flood without their spending millions of Euros to stop it.
Expect to be told politely to go screw yourself.
Clot.

Of course, the Dutch would not move villages, have sacrificial farm land that floods and the few remaining houses on earth mounds to allow flooding to happen, would they?
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/feb/16/flooding-netherlands

I love all this managed landscape back to the romans tosh being spouted, makes it sound like there has been a masterplan for the levels for millennia. At best it might have been managed cohesively since the war, maybe a 40 year period. Before that individual areas were managed by individual land owners who basical dug ditches to get water off their land and onto someone else asap. One thing that has come out of this thread is most people agree the whole catchment basin needs managing in order to protect those couple of hundred homes and farms, the political structures and most of the technology didn’t exist 100 years ago.

Bottom line is the media have now forgotten about, the government / EA will look at the commercial aspects and concluded big flood defence schemes aren’t justifiable. In the meantime the one thing the government has done is to get a levy on home insurance to pay for the insurance of the uninsurable which defeats the basic concept of insuring against a risk and we pay anyway, no body wins.

Funny seeing this thread again. We’re in West Berks and have been VERY close to flooding more than once this winter. Even last Saturday, where we had to call 999 and get the Fire Service out, who funnily enough have still not left from our callout on Sat. Although they are proposed to leave today (being replaced by the EA)

We were looking through the survey report which stated that our house had between a 0-2% chance of flooding within our lifetime. So, not all people who purchase houses and are later affected by floods are completely stupid and bought in a flood plain.

Interesting to note, the Fire crew and kit is costing ITRO £2000 per day to be outside our house currently.