River floods

[Neil]

Nobody can fail to notice the flooding of lots of our rivers recently. Is the climate getting worse and is poor management of river flow and building on flood plains making matters worse?

[CarponlineEditor]

Where i live there is a small stream called the Hogsmill. A few years ago it used to flood each year all across the nearby fields causing all sorts of problems. The council or the NRA decided to put a huge machine into the stream and this machine made the stream about twice as deep so that now when the rains come it doesnt flood at all, it just bombs along at about three hundred miles an hour.

I wonder why the powers that be done do similar things to many of our other rivers as each year we seem to get more and more rain and the problems seem to get worse and worse.

[scorpio]

If you look at the history books you will see that any or most weather phenominum have all happened before, don't go worrying about global warming at the moment, start worrying when we loose kent.

[fatboy]

I live near Maidenhead and I guess the point about building on the flood plain rings very true. They have spent £millions to build (since 1992) a flood alleviation channel, cutting across the countryside and re-joining the river below Windsor. But this then only protects one part of the river and maybe shoves the problem further downstream. And they still build by the river with the latest a block of luxury flats on the site of a derelict boatyard (cant get much closer to the river than that!!), whose ground level car park has flooded out quite regularly. Maybe they should take into consideration flooding when they design these things. Obviously there is the human misery suffered by victims of flooding that we all see on TV which fuels the situation.

I am very much of the mind that we shouldnt mess with nature and building on any flood plain is likely to tempt fate, but the problem is that you cannot undo many many years of development. We have to remember that, in our past, rivers were used for trade purposes and these early settlements started for a reason They maust have had floods then. For me it is a Catch-22 situation, what do you do? You cant clear flood plains, but to protect those properties you tamper with a river by effectively adding a new tributary!!

Also picking up on what Scorpio, I think, said that these things come in cycles. The Thames flooded badly in 1947 again in 1974 (I think) and now 2000. Is this a 26 year cycle? I suppose time will tell.

I also think we have to remember that for several years previous, we have had very dry years, and any prolonged rain would have topped up the underground water table. Now with that water table full, the excess has nowhere to go, so we see alot of surface water. And what about industry which has virtually died out in the South East which extracted hundreds of thousand of gallons of water for its use. Are we seeing the Thames slowly revert to original flow levels?

No answers, but my view is that building on flood plains has made matters worse, but we must be very careful not to solve one problem and create another one.