Long record of failure to act over flooding

From: Tony Milroy, Hebden Bridge.

AS last week’s floods drain away, no doubt the election caravan will too, taking with it the politicians and media cameras. A sea of mud is much drabber and messier than the dramatic visuals of the nearly-submerged village of Fishlake and the despairing words of its nearlyoverwhelmed residents.

As a Yorkshireman, I have long admired The Yorkshire Post for its honest journalism and the robust balance it strives to achieve in its coverage of local, regional and national issues.

Therefore, because of the timing right in the midst of an election, when our county has, once again, taken the brunt of the damage from the latest major floods, this major, national issue surely demands a particularly in-depth, objectively critical analysis of the Environment Agency’s lamentable flood management performance since the major Pitt report of 2005.

Its continuing failure to anticipate, prevent or reduce widespread flood damage has not only particularly affected my own locality in the West Riding’s Calder Valley in recent years but currently severely impacts on other, more southerly parts of our county and well beyond.

Time and time again, the eyewitness, post-flood observations repeatedly expressed by local, practical farmers and rural, district and parish-based agencies and, indeed the wider public, describe the increasing frequency, speed and severity of flash-flooding. They also repeatedly vent their frustration at the build-up of river sediment and the refusal of the EA to tackle this problem or even place a value on local know how and experience.

From: Brian Johnston, Rigton Drive, Burmantofts, Leeds.

IT used to be a simple fact in geography at school that ‘‘rivers will flood in winter’’ and ‘‘all rivers have natural flood plains down stream’’ to reduce the surge in flood conditions.

Today, history is thrown out of the window, and so we have speculative house building on the grand scale on river flood plains, and to hell with the consequences – flood defences or not.

The tragedy on the Don, east of Doncaster, is on a flat landscape, prone to flooding around Goole, criss-crossed with man made waterways, constructed by Dutch drainage engineers in the 17th century, and aptly named ‘‘New Holland’’.

Another major factor with widespread flooding is that the dredging of waterways has been completely abandoned by the Environment Agency, thus raising a river bed, reducing the effect of current flood defences.

Climate change is here. Rivers in flood will occur even more and – add to that – the efficient

WATER DANGER: Flooding in Elvington, near York, this week. draining of the land, combined now in the current situation, with a month’s rain in one day, dumped into already swollen rivers. What do you expect? You can’t buck nature.

From: PD Walker, Pool-inWharfedale.

YOUR front page (The Yorkshire Post, November 14) featured a photograph by James Hardisty which was so moving it deserved the phrase “a picture is worth more that a thousand words”.

It depicts a meeting between the Prime Minister, the flood victims and the emergency service staff in a flooded Yorkshire village.

On every face is etched sorrow, anger, despair and dejection as the Prime Minister offers the people who have lost everything a miserable £500. An ashenfaced PM, wishing he had never ventured into the flood-stricken area, faces the wrath of north country people long forgotten in his world. This brilliant piece of photo-journalism sums up this whole tragic year of insecurity and pathos.

It is UK 2019. A very memorable photograph.

From: PL Taylor, Milner Street, Lockwood, Huddersfield.

AS usual, Jeremy Corbyn is taking a political advantage of a disaster – flooding. The Labour leader does not seem to have any political morals or standards of ethics. Should Labour come to power, perhaps we should all emigrate.