Floods are watermarked deep into the culture of every continent on earth,
woven into legends as old as language. More than 200 of them have been
written down, stretching back to the Epic of Gilgamesh, first recorded on
clay tablets about 2000BC.
The story is familiar. A mortal, Utnapishtim, is warned by a god to build a
great boat to protect all the living things of the earth. There then occurs
a flood so wide and so deep that even the gods are afraid. The parallel with
Noah’s exploits in Genesis 7 is obvious.
Floods - whether from rivers, sea or groundwater - have never been halted, and
with rising sea levels and the increasing frequency of record-breaking
weather this is not about to change.
Warnings these days are delivered not by deities but by the new gods of
science and environmentalism. They tell us what is coming, and we wait for
the Noahs and Utnapishtims of government to build us a boat. It is of course
easy to blame governments for not doing so - easy, and in many ways
reasonable, for their foresight and commitment have been lamentable.
No party marches to Downing Street under a banner of better drains; still less
under a pledge to raise water charges to pay for them. For a century or
more, governments have been complacently content to rely upon the
investments of their predecessors. If our transport network were as old as
our drains, we would have 100-mile horse-jams on unmade roads.
As a result we live in an age of paradox, when floods and drought can occur
with bewildering speed, when the price of cheap water flowing from the taps
can be liquid filth seeping through the floorboards or spewing from the
lavatory, and when the cost of cheap food can be a river raging through the
living room.
In our rush for cut-price diets we have created a wipe-down agricultural
landscape empty of hedges and trees, where, for convenience, land is too
often ploughed in the direction of the slope rather than across it. Instead
of retaining water, every furrow becomes a channel that sluices it downhill.
This is a double demon. Not only does the water flood the village or force the
river from its banks, but it carries a cargo of silt to block the already
sclerotic drains. The figures are astonishing. Typical runoff rates are
between 0.1 and 20 tons of soil per hectare a year, and in extreme cases may
reach 100 tons.
More importantly we have separated ourselves from the good, absorbent earth
with an impermeable skin of concrete and tarmac that keeps water out of the
aquifers, where we could use it, and hurries it into drains that cannot cope.
We have reengineered too many of our rivers. A natural river is slow and
meandering between soft banks, not fast and straight between concrete; it
has deposition areas and wetlands. Canalising it gets the water off the land
quickly, but it does so at the cost of wetlands, aquifers and the natural
functioning of river systems. The result is droughts, floods and pollution.
To cap it all, we have redefined flood plains as suburbs and sold a generation
of housebuyers into hazard - hazard not only to themselves but to the rest
of us who suffer the consequences of disrupted river systems and water with
nowhere to go.
Planners under John Prescott, the former deputy prime minister, seemed to
regard the country as some kind of gigantic, inexhaustible sponge. The water
industry stared in dismay at the map of southeast England - already
overloaded, and one of the driest regions in Europe - as Prescott’s men
sharpened their pencils and sketched in new settlements with the merry
abandon of pioneers in a virgin continent.
All will need masses of fresh water. All will expect, when they pull the plug
or flush the lavatory, not to have to think about their waste again.
Above all, they do not expect sewage to flood their houses, streets or
gardens. Yet, extraordinarily, the water companies were not involved by the
government until after its plans for expansion had been published. As a
symptom of institutional madness it stands without equal.
All this has happened despite the furrowed brows of the insurance industry and
the protestations of the Environment Agency, which until recently was not
even a statutory consultee in planning for flood plains. The agency puts a
brave face on things, but it is underfunded and weak. Notoriously the
Environment Agency had £14m cut from its flood defence budget last year, and
though more has been promised in future - an extra £200m in 2010 - this will
coincide with new responsibilities for coastal flooding and might not
translate into extra security for Sheffield, Gloucester or Tewkesbury.
“It’s going in the right direction,” says Jean Venables, vice-president of the
Institution of Chartered Engineers and chief executive of the Association of
Drainage Authorities, “but not far enough.”
The wrong word to use in confronting all this is “solution”. As Venables says:
“It is wrong to raise public expectations that you can prevent floods.” No
matter how much engineering we put in, “there will always be the possibility
of a flow in excess of its design capacity”. We should be talking,
therefore, in terms of flood risk management, not prevention. By acting
wisely, we might at least reduce the frequency with which the system fails,
and the severity of the disaster when it does.
We might not be able to reverse the shortcomings of the past - there is no
real possibility of retro-fitting every town and city with separate storm
drains - but we can avoid repeating them in future.
Comparisons inevitably will be made with the Dutch, and there will be pressure
for big engineering - more concreted rivers, higher walls, better protection
for electricity generating and water pumping stations - to insulate
ourselves further from the consequences of our own mismanagement. If we’ve
engineered the problem, so the theory goes, then we can just as well
engineer the solution.
Some of this will have to happen - not least along the Thames estuary, where
160,000 homes are planned, and to protect development in the Humber estuary.
A spokesman for the UK water companies on the BBC Today programme last week
also made a sensible case for strategic improvements to the sewerage: storm
tanks to hold the overflow; interceptor sewers to divert the flow to the
treatment works rather than the river when overloaded drains spill over into
the sewers.
But we can’t live inside a bunker. Big engineering might have a contribution
to make, but it is at best a palliative: it addresses the symptoms, not the
causes. We need to stop taking water for granted and think more about how we
use it.
As citizens we contribute to the problem every time we flush a cistern, run a
washing machine or empty the bath. Every front garden converted into a hard
standing for a car means more unabsorbed storm-water to swell the flood.
The same logic that persuades us to fight climate change, little by little,
using fewer and more efficient appliances and leaving nothing on standby,
applies just as importantly to water. If running a Humvee is an insult to
the planet, then so is cleaning your teeth under a running tap.
We need simultaneously to harden our attitudes and soften our impact. The
government’s latest pronouncement on development and flood risk was planning
policy statement 25, published in December last year. This places strong
emphasis on so-called sustainable drainage systems - known as Suds - that
engineers have been urging upon it for years.
It’s hard to make Suds sound sexy to anyone but an environmentally aroused
drainage engineer, but what it offers is a much more organic, flexible and
attractive solution to the dispersal of groundwater than the traditional
apparatus of buried culverts and pipework. This way, surface drainage
becomes a feature in the landscape and the natural water cycle is part of
the process.
There is a variety of techniques. Permeable pavements can allow rainwater to
soak directly into the subsoil, exactly as nature intended. Water may be
collected in basins, or “swales”, whence it disperses into subsoil, pond or
wetland; or it may flow into stone-filled trenches or drains for gradual
filtration into the ground.
Swales and filter drains can feed ponds and wetlands, which make their own
visual and ecological contributions to the landscape. The idea is to retain
water for as long as possible and, by slowing its dispersal, maximise the
amount that reaches the aquifers and minimise the amount that floods.
In every way, the government needs to draw water deeper into its
consciousness. The regulator Ofwat needs to relax its obsession with price,
allow water to cost what it’s worth and let water companies invest properly
in the maintenance and renewal of drainage systems which, even if they were
not clapped out, would be unfit for purpose. In their time they were an
inspired and brilliant achievement, but so was the iron horse.
Transport matters too. The clamour for more and wider roads and paved
infrastructure should be received by the Department for Transport with its
fingers in its ears, given that roads and the traffic they carry are main
contributors to runoff and pollution. The case for making more use of
coastal shipping and rail is compelling.
The government must also break its addiction to complex webs of bureaucracy.
There are too many fingers in the puddle – planning authorities, drainage
boards, the Environment Agency, highways authorities, farmers and more – for
cogency and consistency to be possible. All this needs to be ironed out,
with responsibility devolving to a single, competent body with overall
responsibility for drainage and flood defence.
This might or might not be the Environment Agency. If it is, it will require a
new set of teeth and a budget appropriate to the size of the task.
Meanwhile, as the dehumidifiers hum in parlours across the hinterland, the
east coast of England looks out to sea and quivers in its boots. Even before
the current crisis, coastal towns and villages were poor relations in the
queue for investment.
Many sea walls and revetments are past their design life and in dire need of
improvement if the communities behind them are to survive the onslaughts of
fiercer storms and higher waters.
Nobody doubts that the crisis will come. Nobody believes we are ready.
Richard Girling is the author of Sea Change, Eden Books, £16.99
