And Now The Flooding Is Getting Serious

Tuesday 11th February

The mighty river Thames which winds more than halfway across England has a huge catchment area.  Hundreds of small streams and brooks and minor rivers feed into it.  Here in London it is massive, and to be honest looks just the same, but to the West of London it is breaking its banks and causing flooding.  It takes a few weeks for the water to soak into the ground and find its way into the river but it always does.  Apart from evaporating there is nowhere else for it to go.   The Thames Barrier has been raised more times this year than during the last few added together, and this is working in that the tidal surges have been kept at bay, but it can do nothing for water coming the other way.  In fact it would make matters worse of course.

And what is the solution.  Short-term; absolutely nothing.  Long-term it may be possible to put in more restrictions to stop building on flood plains and within towns to create natural drains at pinch points.  However a lot of the villages finding themselves under water have rarely if ever flooded.  The houses are old and there is little that can be done for them.

Maybe, just maybe it may re-ignite the debate about Climate Change, and this mad dash for cheap fossil fuels will be slowed down.  Some real investment is needed in renewable energy that doesn’t pollute the atmosphere; that maybe slows down our share of the heating up of the planet.

But seriously I doubt it.  This Government is hell-bent on fracking, which is an untried method of extracting trapped gas deep in the earth.  And the oil companies are so powerful that even if Labour wins the next election it is unlikely to be stopped.

We were all concerned twenty years ago about rising sea levels if the ice-caps melted.  But it seems that the heating up of ocean currents in the Pacific may have caused this particular stream of wet and stormy weather hitting us.  Let us hope it ends soon, but also that we actually learn some lessons this time.