There was something awe-inspiring about the scale of the disaster enveloping Central England yesterday. From Pangbourne on the Thames to Tewkesbury under the Severn, and a score of places besides, locals seemed overwhelmed by the deluge of television reporters that had descended upon them. The luckiest journalists stood on bridges with roaring rivers as a backdrop, the less fortunate organised themselves a shallow lake or a watery road, the effect often subverted by the kids on bicycles riding over the supposedly impassable floodwaters. In Gloucester, by a large puddle, the BBC news was securely anchored by Kate Silverton, wearing a distressed expression and an even more distressed maroon waterproof. George Alagiah circled overhead in a helicopter, rescuing no one.

The perils of this inundation were obvious. The BBC website carried one item inviting the flooded to send their pictures “and moving footage” to a web address, and another informing readers that motorists who had stopped to photograph the floods had been slammed by the police for “endangering themselves and other road users”. From Standlake in Oxfordshire (“where the Windrush meets the Thames”) a reporter periodically stopped volunteers filling sandbags so that she could interview them. Then there was the danger of runoff from the concerned furrows of Silverton’s brow.

There is a rubric for moments like this, and it’s usually a slightly silly one. “Chaos” refers to irritating disruption, not a state of anarchy; “tales of human misery” don’t signify imminent death, but pensioners being taken upstairs and given hot meals by volunteers; “a wall of water . . . expected to roar down the Thames through the heart of England” is an abrupt rise in river levels, not an inland tsunami.

But for once we have a really quite substantial natural calamity, more akin to the Great Hurricane of 1987 than to the Not So Great Floods of 2000. Rivers that local people have never heard of are bursting their banks from the Welsh border to the Home Counties, covering substantial areas in a reddy-brown soup of water, soil and God knows what.

My favourite question from yesterday came from the front of this paper, asking: “The floods: what went wrong?” The answer, it seemed to me, was: “It rained a hell of a lot.” But the query suggested another headline, this time from a Sunday newspaper, announcing that the Government had been warned of potential flooding as early as last Wednesday. So why, it was implied, hadn’t they stopped it? An irresistible image came to mind of members of the Government, led by Gordon Brown, lying down on river banks to block the rising tide.

I have seen it suggested that ditches weren’t properly cleared, that pumps were unavailable and that perhaps this would have been resolved had we only appointed a minister of floods to coordinate everything (or, failing that, to build an Ark).

All this is just possibly true. Perhaps some of the places now under water would have been an inch or two drier had things been handled better, though it could be that our demands for complete security from natural disaster are overoptimistic. Maybe there are countries where no one ever gets flooded, and there are no forest fires, avalanches, hurricanes, landslides or tornadoes, or if there are, no one is ever inconvenienced by them. I doubt it. I was struck by the mobile flood barriers for Upton-upon-Severn in Worcestershire getting stuck in gridlock on the motorways – and which would have been insufficient for the scale of the floods in that town even had they arrived.

So much for the short term. What about medium-term prevention? Couldn’t we spend enough on flood defences to ensure that almost any building in the flood plain is safe? Or couldn’t we stop building houses in the flood plain, in case we cannot construct good enough defences? The answer to these questions lie in risk assessment. We don’t get flooded every year. Last year, in fact, we had a drought. So how much ought we to pay to safeguard ourselves against an occasional inundation? This week’s publication of the housing Green Paper turned flood-plain building into the temporary “dominant narrative” of housing policy. Everywhere it was as though the commentariat were quoting that fabulous precautionary couplet from William McGonagall to the effect that: “The stronger we our houses build/ The less chance we have of being killed.”

You’d think we were talking about the Nile with its reliable flooding. But our places are built in valleys and by rivers. The nervous Spaniard may have built up hill, we, however, built down dale. Somewhere such as Tewkesbury, surrounded by clue-bearing water meadows, was created on the flood plain, and every 60 years or so, it floods. So should we spend billions on flood defences and stop flood-plain building – incurring an inevitable extra demand on green-belt land – because of this infrequent risk? Mr Brown, I think, says no.

The Dutch, apparently, only permit developments where the risk is of one serious flood every 10,000 years, whereas our Government is prepared to build where the risk is one flood every century. If we think that’s wrong, are we the British people willing to run the expense and non-financial costs of Dutch levels of prudence? Might you not end up, as the British rail system has done, extraordinarily safe at huge expense?

One should note here that the prices of floods themselves have risen. Those of 1947 set the country back £300 million at today’s prices. Yesterday the Association of British Insurers estimated this year’s floods as costing a rather round £2 billion. It could be that we simply can’t afford not to spend the necessary money on flood protection. Even so, I can’t help recalling that, back in the mid1990s, the people of Shrewsbury opposed flood defences that were recommended by the Environment Agency, because they would have been too physically intrusive. They would rather, they said, live with the risk.

That, at least, was a grown-up discussion, in which citizens weighed up the chances of a catastrophe against the price of guarding against it. It suggested the improbable day when we might see a sodden householder tell a TV reporter that yes, she had lost half her furniture, but, on balance, it was worth it.

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