Letter to our Bognor MP
How are we, as residents, supposed to register our disgust/disappointment/ anger/ frustration, at the continuing neglect of our waterways by this totally inept public organisation the Environment Agency?
If we write to anyone, Chairmen of boards, Council officers, Press, Politicians; absolutely nothing happens.
If we arrange meetings, as we locals have done for some five years, as the problem became more and more obvious, everyone sits round some speak, most just look and listen. Helpless. The end answer is that nothing happens but something has to be done.
I know you have had enough and are retiring from the fray but is there really nothing we can do to bring the seriousness of the situation to a head?
The waters this morning along the Ryebank / Aldingbourne Rife, are now almost back to last week’s high, maybe 12-5 inches below the recent highs, but rising, Bognor Golf Club is again unplayable and, like our farmland, soon likely to be covered in sewage once more.
Doubtless houses and businesses in Bognor are close to, or already being affected and, with Christmas looming, what a happy prospect!
There were, so we were told, two additional pumps installed on the seawall at Butlin’s to reduce the water but then, when the water still remained and we asked about these pumps we were told “they were not in use, only in case the present ones failed”! What absolute nonsense!
They should have been in, and running constantly, until the local rifes were cleared? Why not? Who takes these absurd decisions?
I won’t rehearse the problem with you, because I hope, by now, you understand it. The fact remains, unchanged, that until they are cleared of silt and weed growth, back to their original profiles, the water will not run freely.
I wrote to the EA yesterday suggesting a discussion with their local officers and us farmers, with the view of having a deal, whereby the EA clear the problem area south of the Felpham Leisure Centre, down to the sea outlet and, in exchange agree to us farmers arranging to use machinery, long reach excavators, to clear the whole length of the Aldingbourne, Ryebank and Barnham Rifes, back up perhaps to the Yapton/ Barnham boundary?
I don’t expect to hear back from anyone, but just to register the idea.
This is pretty straightforward work, probably two weeks for two machines with the spoils left on one bank to dry and then be levelled in the spring.
Obviously, if the plan were acceptable, we could proceed once the water level has gone down.
Also if the EA were inclined they might make a contribution to landowners, for doing the EA’S work for them? But it would overcome our flooding problems for a generation.
Maybe the EA inspectors could attend, to watch out for frogs and newts? Perhaps not!
But this is not a big job relative to the damage that’s being caused by the Agency’s total inaction. You must know this? Arun Council know it? I’m sure WSCC know it, but nobody has any influence over what we who live with their inaction, know are an incompetent ‘set up’.
This work was done, in the years before they arrived on the scene, by local drainage boards, locally formed, staffed and run by local people, people who understood what needs doing and who would do it! Real experts.
The LDBS were in turn funded by levies on landowners and property owners, and the rivers ran.
Flooding happened, but was gone in two or three days, because the low tides coupled with ‘switched on’ pumps would remove the waters before they caused the problems we see today.
Good farmland made useless, floods lying for weeks. Huge losses incurred.
We all know the EA is an incompetent body, some 28 years beyond its sell by date.
A disaster we should be rid of.
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Nick Adames Flansham