Misery of 2014 floods feels like a lifetime ago

Eight years after the last catastrophic Somerset floods, water management across the county is now on a sounder footing and the rivers authority is working hard to reduce flood risk everywhere, as a delighted Bridgwater and West Somerset MP Ian Liddell-Gr

DEAR George, Hardly a time, you’ll probably agree, to be talking about excess rainfall and how to manage it because right now a little excess rainfall would be welcomed by each and every farmer in my patch – and well beyond.

But I have been prompted to ponder on these things after perusing the annual report of the Somerset Rivers Authority (SRA) – set up, you may recall, in the wake of the disastrous 2014 floods to wrest back control of local waterways from the Environment Agency which was making such a pig’s ear of everything.

Those floods, which visited untold misery on so many families and cost Somerset (at the very lowest estimate) £148 million have proved to be not just a turning point in water management but a U-turning point because we are going back to the way things were always done and keeping the rivers and rhynes properly dredged.

Millions of pounds have been spent on the work, which has involved waterborne operations as well as old-fashioned mechanical dredging from the banks, but the results are clear for all to see. The Parrett, in particular, is flowing through a wider, deeper channel and the report makes it clear that this is the only way to reduce flood risks for properties and reduce the risks of agricultural damage.

Somewhat different from the yarn I was spun pre-2014 when the Environment Agency called me in, pointed to a computer screen and tried to convince me that dredging wasn’t necessary – in essence trying to tell me that a bottle half-full of mud can hold as much water as an empty one.

I was not to be bamboozled and indeed it gave me no great deal of pleasure when I was proved right and the Environment Agency wrong a few months later. Just such a shame that so many people had to suffer so much devastation before we went back to maintaining the rivers in the way they had been successfully managed for some eight centuries.

I know dredging looks expensive on paper but against that cost you have to set the benefits it delivers in allowing farming and many other economic activities to continue unimpeded in the area.

Had we allowed the Environment Agency to continue applying its computer-generated management policies we should have lost homes, businesses and farms across the Levels and the area would have been largely abandoned – much to the delight of certain hard-line conservationists, no doubt. In fact, I am not totally convinced that there wasn’t some secret agenda with this eventuality as its desired outcome.

But I congratulate the SRA on everything it is now achieving towards minimising the flood risk across the county, from the Bridgwater tidal barrage to supporting a fascinating mitigation programme on the mighty River Aller – all four and a half miles of it – in Porlock Vale, whose source I plan someday to organise an expedition to discover!

Yours ever, Ian

Dredging on the River Parrett, near Burrowbridge in Somerset, in 2014, where the area suffered flooding