Daily Mail

Millions of tons of filthy water – and everyone here knows who’s to blame

- by Robert Hardman

FROM up on high, it looks stunning: an inland sea dotted with the occasional ancient church tower and hill settlement. It probably looked much like this when Alfred the Great was burning his cakes and outsmartin­g the Danes on a little hillock called Athelney, a mile or so from where I am standing. Back then, it was called the Isle of Athelney. Today, it is cut off by the waters once more.

But there’s nothing pretty or enchanting about all this down at ground level. When the breeze falters, you catch a whiff of uncorked septic tank. The high water mark is lined with grime. ‘Make sure you wash your hands before you eat anything,’ says the fireman driving the emergency ferry from the ‘mainland’ to the medieval villages of Muchelney and Thorney. The one thing these firemen are unlikely to encounter is a fire.

This 65million cubic tons of filthy water is barely moving. ‘We’ve seen it all washed up outside – condoms, syringes, worse ...’ says James Winslade of Winslade Farm, eight miles to the west. ‘I can’t let the children out in the garden because of what’s out there.’

It is a grim but neat symbol of the chaos afflicting this historic swathe of Somerset: for this is not a natural phenomenon. More than 160,000 acres – 40 square miles and 20 per cent of the entire county – are submerged, but this is a man-made problem with man-made symptoms and it will require man-made solutions.

No one in this part of the world seems in any doubt about who is to blame: the elusive quangocrat­s of the Environmen­t Agency. Their new orthodoxy is that everyone should stop interferin­g and let things take their natural course. It’s an attractive idea if you are ticking environmen­tal boxes in Whitehall – or if you are a water vole. If you are watching your home, your family business, your children’s birthright sink before your eyes, it is a disgrace.

There is nothing new about flooding on the great plains known as the Somerset Levels – as King Alfred would testify. From the Romans to medieval monks to 17th century Dutch engineers to Second World War prisoners, people have been building banks, ditches and sluices to drain this part of the countrysid­e and grow things. Every winter it would flood for a bit and then drain away. Once in a lifetime, the flooding would be very bad indeed and over-run a few homes. That was simply the risk you took when you lived on the Levels.

The trouble is, there was a ‘once in a lifetime’ flood last winter, in November 2012. And now this one’s even worse.

THE people of Somerset are unanimous in what needs to be done. They point out that the Environmen­t Agency stopped dredging the rivers and flogged off the dredging machinery 20 years ago. Now it’s payback time. ‘Start dredging again!’ says every single person I meet from one end of this 20-mile lake place to the other.

‘If your bathplug is clogged with hair, then you unclog it,’ says Julian Temperley, farmer and father of leading fashion designer Alice, as he takes me by tractor to the home of his 98-year- old father (now safely evacuated). The water is black and knee-deep in the kitchen. It’s uninhabita­ble. ‘We had dredging for generation­s and houses didn’t flood. Then they stopped dredging and look what happens!’

He points out that it took military expertise to resolve that ghastly epidemic of foot and mouth disease in 2001. ‘I’d have greater faith in the Environmen­t Agency if there was a brigadier in charge of it.’

‘If you let your gutters get blocked, you get trouble,’ says a regular at the bar of the King Alfred Inn at Burrowbrid­ge. Just outside, an extraordin­ary hill called the Burrow Mump offers a superb panoramic view of the problem. Landlady Sally Taylor makes a telling observatio­n.

In the old days, when the waterways dried out, they used to be U-shaped thanks to dredging work. Now, they are V-shaped. By the Environmen­t Agency’s own admission, the capacity of the River Parrett, a few yards away, is down by 40 per cent.

The water is seeping up through the flagstones below the pool table, but it’s business as usual. In fact, the place is buzzing. On an adjacent table, I meet three other members of the Temperley family.

‘We’ve always had flooding, but not like this,’ says Diana Temperley, Julian’s wife. It’s a birthday pub lunch for elder daughter, Mary, 36, a mother of two, but the talk is of ruined apple crops and marooned sheep. Younger daughter Matilda, 32, a photograph­er, has been capturing images of these floods for weeks.

‘The Environmen­t Agency are trying to blame all this on extreme weather, but the weather is not that unusual,’ she explains. ‘It’s just the water has nowhere to go.’

Another group of locals walk in with matching sweatshirt­s. They all say: ‘Start dredging.’

I contact the Environmen­t Agency, where a spokesman reiterates the official line: ‘Increased dredging of rivers on the Somerset Levels would not have prevented the recent widespread flooding because of the sheer volume of rainfall.’ YESTERDAY, we heard the head of the Environmen­t Agency, Lord [ Chris] Smith, a former Labour minister, argue that these floods are a complex issue and, thus, there are no easy answers.

Around here, the mere mention of his name invokes snorts of derision. ‘Inner city MP, wasn’t he?’ says farmer Graham Walker, giving me a lift on the tractor ferry with which he has been taking people in and out of Thorney. Graham has another bone to pick with officialdo­m. The county council has just told schools that children may no longer travel to class by tractor trailer. ‘It’s so ridiculous it defies belief,’ he says. Presumably, on that basis, all carnival floats are henceforth illegal.

These are people who know the ways of these ancient and complex watercours­es. And, in their view, that knowledge has been completely ignored by officialdo­m and yet they are the ones left to suffer the consequenc­es.

Little wonder the Environmen­t Secretary, Owen Paterson, had such a hostile reception when he dropped in earlier this week. It didn’t help that it had taken three weeks for him to come and that he failed to visit a single flooded home. Perhaps his greatest sin was to arrive in a pair of black shoes. ‘Where were his Wellington boots?’ asks Julian Temperley. ‘He was a man walking into a storm and he does seem to have had a good kicking,’ says Charlie Vaughan- Johnson, the goodhumour­ed, unofficial ‘harbourmas­ter’ of Muchelney – on the grounds that the ‘ferry terminal’ is next to his garden gate. None of these people is moaning about flooding per se. It is the needless extent of the problem which upsets them – and the fact that this is the second time this has happened in 14 months.

James Winslade’s family have farmed this patch of the Somerset Levels for 150 years. But now, for the first time, his parents are homeless, driven out by the floods. ‘My father’s 88 with dementia, so it’s very important to keep things familiar. But how can you do that in this?’

For three weeks now, 790 of the family’s 840 acres have been underwater. The last flood cost him £163,000. This one will cost the same again and may even put the farm out of business. In which case, Winslade Farm will be without Winslades for the first time since Queen Victoria.

Still, at least the water voles should be alright.

WHOLE villages marooned, possession­s and livelihood­s destroyed, sewage swilling from overflowin­g cesspits into kitchens and living rooms…

no, this isn’t some primitive corner of the Third World, stricken by an act of god. This is Britain, 2014 – and the blame for this wholly avoidable disaster lies squarely with human officials who have betrayed those they are paid to serve.

indeed, it is hard to imagine the misery and squalor endured for almost a month – and, for many, the third year running – by the people of the Somerset Levels, where heartbroke­n farmers have seen up to 95 per cent of their land 10ft deep in floodwater. as even the ecomaniacs at the Met Office agree, this has nothing to do with global warming.

it is the result of a deliberate strategy by the Environmen­t agency, with its peculiarly metropolit­an mindset, to put fashionabl­e green causes above the basic needs of rural dwellers.

For as little as £4million, as Christophe­r Booker argues on this page, the agency could have averted the floods by dredging local rivers and clearing ditches, following practices pursued since the 17th century, when Dutch settlers drained the Levels.

instead, it allowed them to silt up – while £31million has been spent on dismantlin­g flood defences a few miles up the coast to turn hundreds of acres of farmland into a bird sanctuary.

it’s the same everywhere from Kent to Cheshire, as the authoritie­s neglect their fundamenta­l duty to guard against the growing risk of flooding.

indeed, as homes for our fast expanding population put ever more pressure on flood plains, there is an urgent need for a national strategy to cope.

as for the money this will cost (less than it will save), where better to find it than in the bloated overseas aid budget?

Strictly speaking, the afflicted areas of the UK may not be in the Third World. But as the people of Somerset will testify, they might as well be.

 ??  ??

Newspapers in English

Newspapers from United Kingdom