This is the Somerset Levels today

maltingsaudio

Thank my god I don't live in those areas but very close

http://www.buzzfeed.com/alanwhite/27-staggering-new-pictures-of-the-somerset-levels-floods

johnnyurq

Holy shit that is pretty bad, poor buggers.

ChrisMusic

Bloody hell !   I had no idea, thanks for posting that maltings.

Looking at the lake out back, I am glad it's not happening here  (yes it is supposed to be a lake)

I think the road into town might be flooded in the morning, but nothing like this...  devastating...

Bellycaster

I feel for those people, it's absolutely staggering how bad it is.

koneguitarist

I know a few people from the area and around Muchelney ,Langport areas who can't get into work. Awful for them at the moment, my workmate at 60 years old has lived in that area all his life and has never ever seen it so bad, but everybody knows the cause. They have stopped dredging the rivers.

Antique_Guitars

One of the managers from work lives somewhere in oxford inbetween where two rivers meet or something, he say it floods most years but this year has been crazy. He said the neighbours tractor and brand new land rover is completely submereged and the bloke down the roads house it almost completely underwater. Apparently the bloke down the road was on holiday in Dubai and phoned to check on the situation, when he found out his house was underwater he supposedly cancelled his flight home and has extended his stay in Dubai. Supposedly he is some retired film director so he is not really bothered by it and his Ferrari and Bentley were moved to higher ground before he went away............

Grunfeld

koneguitarist said:

...everybody knows the cause. They have stopped dredging the rivers.

I don't know enough to know what the causes are but I've just seen that we've got problems with the Thames and other rivers here too -- we've got 14 severe flood warnings for London -- and I was wondering if they've stopped dredging the London rivers, and if this alone is the cause?

Phil_aka_Pip

The people in Chertsey can thank the rich people in Maidenhead ... a huge drain was built from there to all around Eton/Windsor so they don't get flooded - it just dumps the water in Chertsey instead. But hey, the Chertsey people are all "poor" and a lot of them are in council houses so they don't matter...

RobDavies

Meanwhile.....

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/feb/09/nigel-farage-uk-aid-budget-somerset-flood-victims

Whilst I have every sympathy for the people of the Somerset levels, diverting aid from people who REALLY need it, is ridiculous, surely?

ICBM

koneguitarist said:

I know a few people from the area and around Muchelney ,Langport areas who can't get into work. Awful for them at the moment, my workmate at 60 years old has lived in that area all his life and has never ever seen it so bad, but everybody knows the cause. They have stopped dredging the rivers.

Is that really true? If the rivers had been dredged, would there really have been enough extra capacity to take all that water away - given that the rivers have risen to the point where the river channel itself is a tiny fraction of the total volume of water? I think it's a way of blaming somebody for something which is actually beyond human control at this point. I grew up in Worcester and my parents still live there, so I know something about flooding too .

In Worcester the levels are high but not actually higher than they have ever been historically, both when dredging was done and when it wasn't. If anything the dredging was done more (possibly exclusively, I'm not certain) for navigation than flood prevention. The thing that really helps stop flooding is allowing the water to spread out over a wide area, so the volume produces less depth. The problem is that over the decades, houses and even whole towns have been built on the flood plains. That's why the really old places - like Muchelney, and the centre of Tewkesbury - are on the highest ground… medieval people weren't fools.

But now, in Worcester some genius put a road embankment for the new bridge downstream of the city right across the flood plain - instead of a viaduct, which was "too expensive" - and that helps hold the water back… there's probably a lot of other modern infrastructure in and around cities which this applies to as well.

That's not to say that the people in flood management are necessarily competent either, but it sounds more like a convenient way for Cameron and others to say they'll "do something" when really the stable door has been left open for decades and the amount of money they would need to spend to properly protect most affected housing is beyond their imagination. A few million quid on dredgers isn't going to do it.

bertie

dont forget that the rivers in question in somserset are pretty much "man made"  (or man re-coursed)  and are drains from the levels, so are flood management by design........... they just simply havent been maintained.........  Im in no position to state if dredging (or lack of) is the golden ticket solution, but Id wager its a damn high %age -  for the levels anyway,  but as you say - this will simply move the issue furthery down stream towards tidal effected parts of the waterways.   Last year part of the river wall collapsed in Bridgwater itself

VimFuego

ICBM, you are correct, it isn't the whole truth. While it is true that dredging would help, it isn't the whole answer. I did read a very interesting article by a consultant hydrologist where he explained that dredging alone would not help, sadly it seems to have been deleted from the forum where I read it, I've asked for it to be re posted, if it is then I'll link it.

Basically, there have been a whole series of failures, both policy ones and land management ones. It all starts in the uplands, which have been denuded of trees and hedgerows which absorb a huge amount of water and also stabilise soil so you get less run off into the rivers. Soil erosion is a major issue, which can be mitigated to a large degree with good land husbandry. Then there is the demise of the water meadow, these were areas that were deliberately flooded in the winter to both produce a good crop of grass for hay but also to act as a store for excess winter rain, it was carefully and skilfully managed to allow a slow release of water downstream. Now we just grow fast growing grass species that get cut for haylage multiple times a year.

It's easy to unthinkingly blame organisations like the environment agency (who are not without blame in this, is should be said) as that allows us to avoid looking at the bigger picture.

 

found it, but it's weirdly formatted, I will try to edit it:

Simon,
 Perhaps you can post it on my behalf.
 Speaking as a professional hydrologist there are merits on all  sides of the argument. Clearly it is an emotive subject, particularly for those experiencing the flooding at the moment. However, I'm not sure emotive language and insults help anyone. The main issues are of scale and importance. Although I don't know the Somerset Levels well, I do know the Fens - a similarly engineered expanse of very flat drains. The Levels are man-made and therefore cannot be directly compared to natural catchments whereby water flows through the soil structure towards the lowest point, as they do in the upper catchments. Likewise the channels have been artificially created/
widened. But because the area is flat, flow occurs, not due to the gradient in the river bed, but the gradient in the water level. This is how pumping works - it artificially lowers the water level at one location creating a surface (or energy) gradient that allows water to move towards it. A head (difference in water levels) is therefore required in order for flow to take place between two points. In this type of situation, dredging will help a little, but only by increasing storage - it does not increase the energy gradient. This is George Monbiot's point. The better solutions by far are to do  with changes in upstream land use, retaining soil on the land and improving soil structure, as both George and Simon say. Undertaken over reasonably large areas these activities will retain water  longer in the upper catchment, while it is still widely distributed, rather than trying to deal with it once it is all concentrated in the water course. Note that any tree planting undertaken in this regard must not be done by ploughing perpendicular to the contours (as is Forestry Commision practice). This will result in the opposite effect, creating hundreds of additional drainage conduits straight downhill in the upper  catchment that wil significantly increase the rate of catchment  response to rainfall, exacerbating the situation downstream. More drains won't help either because they won't increase the discharge capacity of the system - only the available storage -  which, as George points out, is minuscule compared to the volume of flood water. The monks built the drains, not to cope with flooding 
from the upper catchment, but to drain the local soils so they could grow wool and food. It's a bit like saying we need a few extra minis to evacuate a city. Of course there is always the option of building vast concrete trapezoidal channels for the water, which is what has been done in the Fens (and in places like  Jeddah and Kuwait City to cope with the sudden and enormous volumes of desert floods). However, the fact that twice the average monthly rainfall has fallen in the wettest January on record actually also plays a small part in this. That is a LOT of water. To say the flooding is entirely a man-made disaster is, I hope, hyperbole (notwithstanding the rather banal comment that there's been 'no cloudburst or crazy  storm'). But the solutions advocated in the farmer's article, I suggest, really wouldn't make much difference to the situation at all - the land is flat (that is, neither uphill nor downhill - no disrespect to Mr Temperley) and dredging 15 miles won't change that. As for the claim that last year saw a once-in-a-lifetime flood, so we shouldn't have another one the next year, well that's often the way climate works and statistics don't. And it's no secret that climate statistics have been being broken on a fairly regular basis over the last 20 years. Are we experiencing a shift in the climate's underlying statistical distribution? I am just slightly surprised no-one has mentioned climate change - warmer, wetter  winters are exactly what have been predicted since I first started working on climate-change impacts over 25 years ago.

 Rob

Phil_aka_Pip

That's very interesting Vim. I can't see any politician having a brain large enough to comprehend the whole picture. Cameron will continue - as he has just begun - to bleat about dredging, and the oil companies will continue to wheel out scientists in their attempts to disprove climate change, but nobody will address the problem of managing the upstream land, and of course nobody will stop property developers from building on flood plains.

xSkarloey

I find the finger pointing between various ministers and Govt agencies predictable but even less forgivable under the circumstances. 

Just as predictable are the calls for a public enquiry as to what went wrong and why x or y wasn't done. 

My own feeling is all this proves we need a genuinely long term approach. Government already knows what the worst case scenarios are for flooding in each area of the country. What they actually need to do is work out what adequate defences are needed, order the works carried out and most impotently to foot the bill. 

The Thames barrier is an example of public works conducted along these lines. 

Roland

What I love about this forum is the high percentage of knowledgeable posts

xSkarloey

RobDavies said:

Meanwhile.....

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/feb/09/nigel-farage-uk-aid-budget-somerset-flood-victims

Whilst I have every sympathy for the people of the Somerset levels, diverting aid from people who REALLY need it, is ridiculous, surely?

To be honest I'm of the opinion that it's not a case of either/or, and that a civilised rich country like ours should be able to afford both. 

Think of the savings alone if Cameron could be persuaded to stop jetting off abroad pretending to look all Prime Ministerial, and actually put in a shift behind his desk. 

Phil_aka_Pip

Skarloey said:

Think of the savings alone if Cameron could be persuaded to stop jetting off abroad pretending to look all Prime Ministerial, and actually put in a shift behind his desk. 

I'm not convinced. The more jetting off abroad he does, the less damage he can do here ...

Grumpyrocker

Someone I know used to work in flood prevention and told me dredging in Somerset would have made little to no difference. But people there think it will - so what if the science says otherwise. Angry thick people are always right.

So now the government is pandering to them and promising dredging and blaming the EA for not dredging. It's become a political football, meanwhile people are having their homes destroyed. 

The government won't be able to use the dredging excuse against once it's done and the flooding still happens. Meanwhile millions will have been wasted on the wrong approach.

chrispy108

Perhaps we should stop living in flood plains and in bits of the country that nature wants to be underwater.

I also wonder why the residents didn't all chuck some money in a kitty and pay for the dredging between themselves if they felt it was so important. My last flat was in Brighton Marina, and the homeowners/businesses there pay for the maintenance of the sea-wall/lock between them, so why should the government pay to keep the Levels drained? 

Cirrus

Reminds me of a news story I read a few years ago.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7492056.stm

Unfortunately the UK used to have a lot of wetlands which are fantastic for water storage. We've drained them, then built all over them. It is what it is.

VimFuego

Phil_aka_Pip said:

That's very interesting Vim. I can't see any politician having a brain large enough to comprehend the whole picture. Cameron will continue - as he has just begun - to bleat about dredging, and the oil companies will continue to wheel out scientists in their attempts to disprove climate change, but nobody will address the problem of managing the upstream land, and of course nobody will stop property developers from building on flood plains.

I don't think anyone is capable of really managing the big picture. In the past, they didn't do all those things to a plan to prevent flooding, they did them because they needed trees for timber and wood, they needed hedgerows to keep stock in or out or for wood, they managed water meadows because they needed the hay and for autumn grazing. We don't need those things now, so we don't do them. Dunno what the answer is though.