Flooding - The New Normal in the UK!

Flooding used to be relatively unusual in the UK, unfortunately now we've come to expect it to have major impacts across the country every year;

This as least partly self-induced by house-builders - in an era when climate change has meant flooding is becoming ever more likely i in 13 new homes over the last decade have been built in high risk flood zones.

This is obviously not that smart when one of the predictors of flooding is where people live and we've been building some of our housing in, well, areas where it's predicted there is a high flood risk!

The problem

It's as if we can't help ourselves... knowingly making the problem worse by building on flood plains, but the reason developers keep on doing it is because the land is cheaper, and building rules are too relaxed.

And local councils which are short of cash are under pressure to improve such developments because of the extra revenue they bring, although this may well backfire if they end up having to pay more on emergency relief for flood victims!

And to compound all of this water companies aren't building the kind of flood resilient water systems we need either.

The end-note on this is we have some towns in the UK know, such as Tenbury Wells, where flooding happens so often that public buildings can no longer get insurance, which makes one wonder how much longer these towns are going to last!

I see a lot of flooding in my home county of Herefordshire, it's terrible when it happens!

Climate Change Meets Short-Term Politics...

Another problem with dealing with flooding is that it simply isn't that dramatic enough to make the government respond appropriately, it doesn't have the impact of hurricanes or forest fires, it's not usually on that kind of scale - it hits relatively small towns usually, and 100s, not thousands of people at a time.

The effect is disparate and slow, and so it's very easy for the government to ignore and not really worry about doing anything to fix the longer term problems!

We're basically REACTIVE and not getting ahead of the problem!