A weather eye
STORM CHRISTOPH has blown its way across the country, bringing misery in its wake. Once again, the news has been full of flooded homes, sudden sinkholes, impassable roads and battered seafronts—all compounded by snow, cold and the not inconsiderable problems for rescue services operating during a pandemic.
Even at the best of times, we in Britain are preoccupied by the weather, but that’s because it’s so varied. We have every kind of rain, from drizzle to cats and dogs, but there aren’t many days when there isn’t at least a ray from the sun, often immediately before sunset, when it dips below the cloud line—four seasons in a day. We notice the drama of named storms because they are out of the usual run of our temperate and, frankly, quite unexciting climate. Other countries are used to harsh conditions and hardly notice more extreme weather; we most decidedly do.
Two years ago, we had a February heatwave—the first time a temperature of 20˚C was recorded in an English winter. Since then, umbrellas have been blown inside out by Storms Ciara, Dennis and Bella, among others, and now Christoph; last week’s meeting of the House of Lords select committee on Risk Assessment and Risk Planning could not have been more timely, for we know we must take more imaginative action against the unpredictable.
Those flood defences we already have must be maintained and a different attitude adopted towards land drainage. We need to slow the rate at which water runs off fields and into rivers through tree planting and re-wetting boggy land (often previously drained with the help of misguided Government grants). This must be recognised by the post-brexit farm subsidy regime.
However, as Prof David Balmforth, a past president of the Institution of Civil Engineers, told their lordships last week, the problem is not only a rural one, nor does the solution lie exclusively in the countryside. As urban front gardens are concreted over to provide car parks and precious real estate is developed more intensively, there are fewer places for rain, when it falls in bucketloads, to drain away.
We must seek to develop wetlands in urban areas. Car parks should be made porous. We need more parks. Until last year, it seemed obvious that cities should become more densely developed, to provide better services and save the countryside, but Covid-19 has pressed the pause button; fewer people will work in office blocks now.
We must rethink our attitude to cities, creating more open space and implementing better water management. Fortunately, this will not only reduce flooding, but should improve our quality of life.