Floods!

Well I have just been chatting to a relative in Somerset; despite storms and heavy rain Somerset has not been so flooded this winter; apparently the dredging of the rivers has worked, some roads have been flooded but (fingers crossed) not so disastrous as 2013/14.

Yes I know rosequartz I was trying to give an outline.
And in storm overflow situations as well, foul water can end up in sea or river - sewers overloaded etc
Ah right Tegan well not sure who that would come under. EA maybe?

Here is a very good blog on the mismanagement by the government that has contributed to the flooding. In a nutshell, funding cut despite knowledge that more flooding expected.

mainlymacro.blogspot.co.uk/2015/12/how-osborne-and-cameron-turned-crisis.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Feed:+MainlyMacro+(mainly+macro)

The S.O. told me he'd read that one of the causes of the York flooding was a pumping station that hadn't been maintained. When my village nearly flooded a few years ago a faulty pump was the cause. Thankfully [touch wood] our flood defences are good at the moment.

Older house may have a combined system of drains though, and many modern homes have been misconnected so foul and surface water go into the same drainage system.

It shouldn't happen but it does.

Probably different drains Tegan. There's your "surface water drains" and your sewers. Household water goes down the sewers including dishwasher, bath etc. Water that falls on gardens roofs and roads ends up in surface water drains. You pay for this "service" via your water rates but most water companies then pay the councils to maintain the drains and sewers. So council cut backs and austerity should not affect them. The WCs take over when the sewer water reaches the sewage processing plants.
If all the surface water ended up in the sewage processing plants there would be a bit of a problem with their processes getting kind of diluted or even swamped in heavy downpours. So the surface water in the main gets discharged into rivers etc. You can complain to your water company if you think your LA is slacking I think.
Not sure which pumping stations you are thinking of.

jings it is El Nino which means The Christ Child in Spanish. Hence my very proper Capitals. It really should have a squiggle on the second n. shrug.

Yes, it is an El Nino year this year which, although in the Pacific, affects weather world-wide.

Perhaps if people stopped pouring fat and wipes down the drains and causing fatbergs they could take more water.

Apparently, it's because the part near the equator has got hotter and the poles are still just as cold (well, only slightly warmer) so the wind is coming from the west and bringing rain from the Atlantic. And Elmino (sp?) is in there somewhere.

Or something.

This is in accordance with info given by One-Who-Knows-Everything. And I've probably got it all wrong.

The problem is the result of lots of things but lack of maintenance at pumping stations has made things far worse; and various organisations had warned that this would happen. That wasn't the fault of joe public, although I am annoyed with myself for not emailing my MP when I first heard of the cutbacks. I'll do what I can to ease the situation but am not prepared to blame myself for what has happened.

When it comes down to it, the floods have been caused by a helluva lot of rain falling in a short space of time. Dredging rivers, clearing drains etc would have made little difference. It's just the current weather pattern, probably mostly natural, and probably partly down to us.

Daft question here but, when I noticed that the drains seemed to be overflowing and there was a lot of surface water I wondered if we needed to cut back on the amount of water going down our drains; loo flushing, dishwasher use; washing machines etc. I'm very Scrooge like with my water use these days now I have a water meter but have a lot of post Christmas washing that needs doing and wondered if I should hold off until conditions improve. I'm down to my last teatowel but could just wash a few and use my spin dryer to dry them. Other items will pile up a bit could leave them for a week of so as the airing cupboard is full of clean stuff.

Exactly!

Or is it a way of not spending the money, whitewave?
Like the money for the NHS being offered providing they save nearly three times as much.
Both need front-loading. Neither will be.

Good to hear that the government will match £ for £ any money raised by charities up to 2m. So if they have that available why not just add it to the total- what a lot of nonsense.

Trouble with austerity is that it does destroy jobs, reduce tax take and make more people unemployed. Not just public sector - lots of "green jobs" have been lost due to Osborne changing policies on subsidies for low carbon technologies and insulation of homes.

we know that the maintenance to flood defences was left and the money diverted to high profile new flood defences which the government was able to showcase.

How can we have a Northern powerhouse when its biggest cities flood on a regular basis?

The Thames barrier will need reinforcing as we know that it will prove inadequate within a very few years.

sea defences are becoming more inadequate and many communities are under threat, and this isnt just small communities but value of far more than 8 to 1.

Many communities that flooded over the past few years have had either inadequate or no flood defences put into place.

The government is playing fast and loose with peoples lives and livelihoods
all on the alter of Osbornes austerity. This is the very thing that Keynes would argue needs to be addressed in order to get the economic growth we need.

www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/jan/02/tory-cuts-wrecking-uk-flood-defences

I wonder who leaked that document. Letwin in charge again.

Just the place M0nice

sure to get planning permission for houses

No, I appreciated that, it was just a comment that locally Tesco was daft enough to want to expand their store even though they knew it was on the flood plain. The existing store flooded fairly comprehensively in 2012. Presumably as planning consent has been refused, they will want to build houses on it.

M0nica

I didn't mean the building of new supermarkets or expansion of existing ones on flood plains (they can do that if they have the permission, that doesn't worry me).
What I meant was that, because their expansion programmes are not going ahead, they were going to be encouraged to release the land they have acquired for building houses.
I was wondering how much of this land is on flood plains.

JessM No, the government has not removed targets for housebuilding. It did issue a document a few months ago that abolished national housebuilding targets, instead the onus to draw up housing targets is given to local councils.

Except that about two years ago the government brought out its Strategic Housing Market Assessment (SHMA). This document tells each authority how many houses it must build before 2030 to meet predicted housing requirements. In almost every case the SHMA figures are well above the LA estimates. The LAs are told that, of course they can appeal, but so far every appeal has been thrown out and in the mean time the LA cannot stop any development going ahead because the government has said that until the Local Plan is agreed the LAs cannot refuse any planning application.

I belong to CPRE and in my county we commissioned one of the acknowledged leading experts on housing need to examine both the LA and the SCHMA figures. They were full of miscalculations and dubious interpretations of the figures and in a carefully well-resoned paper his estimate was lower than both the LA and SCHMA figures.

In Oxfordshire the consultants that produced the original SCHMA for the government recommended far fewer houses in the county than the government wanted, so the government withdrew the Oxfordshire Study from the main document and commissioned another firm of more pliable consultants to do a study that gave the government the figures it wanted.

I am not objecting to the construction of new houses, they are needed and ours is a growth area and dormitory for two much more expensive towns, but we are getting no improvements to infrastructure. The school in our village is full and children moving into the 300 new houses already built or being built have to travel to other schools, if they can find any that have places for them. In our area of the county, because of the Green Belt, AONB and flood plain the LA has no alternative to giving consent for houses on the flood plain. There is nowhere else to build.

Current government has removed targets for housebuilding hasn't it MOnica - part of the reason why the shortage is going to continue. Maybe this has not yet taken effect.
I think planning gain may be part of it - but that is a kind of mitigation for a development that is going ahead. Having lived in MK it is very familiar to me - the have to include parkland etc.
I was thinking more about the effects of big builders (and nearly all houses are built by a few big firms) lobbying the government if there is any whiff of legislation that will make their business environment more challenging. e.g. if they are asked to make houses more fuel efficient. So governments are swayed into letting things go on as they are.

Around us Tesco has been trying to expand their own supermarket onto the flood plain.

My local authority is under real pressure, not just from the developers but also the government. The government has insisted that 20,000 houses have to be built within the LA by 2030, but a large part of the area is Green Belt, more is in an AONB and much is on the flood plain. All attempts by the LA to oppose building in any of these three protected areas is overridden by the government when the developer takes it to appeal. There is one such appeal going on in my village at the moment.

The Environment Agency does regularly revise floodplain maps, again our village map has been redrawn and the flood plain are expanded following the massive rain event in 2007 which flooded a village that had not flooded or come anywhere near it since 1947, the flood before that was 1892.

The other thing is that building firms and even supermarkets, eg Tesco, own a lot of land which we have been saying should be released for building houses which are desperately needed - how much of this land is on flood plains?
And do they need to redefine which areas are flood plains after these latest disasters?

It's called planning gain, JessM. You let me build my houses where I want and I'll give the council something in return.
It wouldn't be necessary if the councils were funded properly.

Planning permission is still being granted for houses on flood plains - and there was TV coverage of modern houses flooded. Unless the planning authorities are working under rules rather than following guidelines, house builders will still get some of their own way. it is the same in other aspects of construction, such as building regulations.