select search filters
briefings
roundups & rapid reactions
Fiona fox's blog

experts respond to news of further severe flooding in the UK

Professor David Lerner, Director of the Catchment Science Centre, University of Sheffield, said:

“Don’t forget that most of the time we love our rivers, for walking along, fishing and boating in, and even living by. They carry our sewage away and they provide habitats for many desirable species of wildlife. We mustn’t let our fear of flooding destroy the values we hold in our rivers for 99.9% of the time, rather we must ‘make space for water’ and learn to design our cities better.”

May Cassar, Professor of Sustainable Heritage, UCL, said:

“Once flooding has receded, then the real work will start: mud will have to be cleaned off carefully, historic buildings will need to be checked for structural stability – they may have been weakened by rushing water and floating objects colliding with them. How is COBRA dealing with the impact that flooding is having on our historic environment? If COBRA is dealing with it, it would be good to know because the next question is: does the UK have enough trained conservation architects, conservation engineers and object conservators to get the historic environment back on its feet? It is vital to the tourism economy that it does.”

Dr Jon Finch, Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, said:

“Last Friday, a warm and very moist air mass moving north from France producing remarkable storm rainfall totals in much of southern Britain. Thundery interludes contributed to substantial spatial and temporal variations in rainfall intensity but catchment rainfall totals were extraordinarily large over wide areas. Localised storms of exceptional intensity are a feature of most English summers but a distinguishing characteristic of the storms on Friday was the large spatial extent of the extreme rainfall totals. At this stage, it would appear that the rainfall totals in the Welsh Hills, i.e. the headwaters of the catchment of the river Severn, were significantly less than in the rest of the catchment. Had there been heavy rainfall in this area then it would, in all probability, have already entered the main body of the Severn. It is striking that there has been no report of flooding in the Shrewsbury area which would tend to confirm that rainfall, and thus runoff, was substantially less in the upper part of the catchment than in the rest. It is true to say that there is not much storage capacity in the ground for further rainwater, but at this point, unless there is a very heavy deluge in that area, I would not expect a serious run-off from the Welsh Hills into the river Severn in the near future.”

Dr Ken Flint, Microbiologist, University of Warwick, said:

“As long as people don’t drink the flood water they won’t get a water borne disease. The problems though are long term e.g. flooded allotments (if the plants survive then they could be sewage contaminated).”

Prof Andrew Watkinson, University of East Anglia, said:

“What is evdient in tackling the problem of climate change and changes in flood risk is that there is no single silver bullet that will solve the problem. Engineering flood defences is certainly not the single most effective response. Rather we need a portfolio of measures including engineering, changes in land use planning, floodproofing, changes in building regulations, flood storage and a raft of other measures.”

Dr Jan Alexander, University of East Anglia, said:

“As with many natural hazards, we cannot stop flooding occurring. The current preferred option in the UK is to try and engineer the system to protect areas from flooding, for example building levees, putting up flood walls. But this becomes more difficult and more costly as the scale of the flooding increases, partly as a result of building on catchment areas increasing volume of run-off. There is increased danger if the protection fails.

“Britain could learn from other countries where large floods are more frequent. We could either design and build flood defences to withstand much bigger floods, or build new houses that are adapted to flooding. For example, in many parts of the world houses are built with space below them, on stilts or pillars, so that floods become an inconvenience, not a disaster.”

Dr Tim Osborn, University of East Anglia, said:

“Has climate change played a role in these floods? That question would be much easier to answer had these floods occurred in winter. Over the past forty years the winter trend has been for much heavier downpours when it rains and that is backed up by climate models. It’s a case of ‘It never rains but it pours’ in the winter.

“Observations and climate change models show drier summers on average, but with occasional extremely wet periods that might be more extreme than we would experience without the climate change effect. So, while we cannot say for sure that the current flooding is caused by climate change, we cannot rule it out.
What is clear, however, is that if the sequence of weather patterns that caused these floods (more southerly jet stream and the set of low pressure systems associated with it) had happened 50 or 100 years ago, it would still have been extremely wet, but perhaps not quite so wet.

“The slightly cooler atmosphere back then (it has warmed 0.5 to 1 degree C, mostly due to greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide) would have held less water vapour and thus supplied less total rainfall. A 1 degree C change in temperature would suggest about a 7% change in rainfall from an event like this. So the equivalent of a downpour of 100mm today would have produced 93mm of rain in conditions one degree cooler.

“Some people would have been flooded whether it was 93mm or 100mm. But in places where flood defences were only just breached, a 7% difference in rainfall might have been ‘the drop of water that made the bucket overflow’ (to paraphrase the French equivalent of ‘the straw that broke the camel’s back’, far more apt for this situation!).”

Dr Keith Jones, Health-Related Environmental Microbiologist, Lancaster University, said:

“Despite the dire warnings about outbreaks of disease following flooding, they rarely happen.

“Although there is the potential for an increase in enteric disease after flooding, if you follow the advice given by the Environment Agency and the Environmental Health Officers, you should be safe.”

Bob Sargent, president of the Chartered Institution of Water and Environmental Management (CIWEM), said:

“The publication of the green paper on increasing house building yesterday was aptly timed and the government admitted that not all the new housing could be built out of the flood plain. This clearly increases the flood risk to those unfortunate enough to buy one of the new houses in a known flood risk area but what is missed is that all of the new development is likely to generate runoff to rivers and streams and thus increase the flood risk to those living downstream.

“CIWEM supports the use of a set of new runoff techniques, known as sustainable drainage systems (SUDS), which can minimise the runoff volume and also offer improvements in water quality and habitat. This technology is well advanced but its use in this country is hampered by out-of date law and our fractured drainage regulation system. Developers wishing to use SUDS are faced with local authorities and water companies who refuse to accept them because they cannot legally be defined as a surface water sewer and also their lack of knowledge about, or unwillingness to pay for, their maintenance.

“These problems have existed for over 10 years with almost no progress being made despite the acknowledged ability of SUDS to reduce runoff and lessen flood risk from new development. If we are going to pave over more of our countryside we need to update or regulations and our attitude to prevent making a bad situation even worse in the future.”

Justin Taberham, CIWEM Director of Policy, said:

“What is significant and thought provoking is that a year ago we were seeking ways to retain water. Now we are desperate for it to go out to the sea. What we need is a more holistic approach that recognises the role of catchments in terms of flood storage and stormwater flow reduction. Water should be managed more sustainably through the use of greenspace, wetlands, flood storage zones and SUDS (sustainable urban drainage), holding back flow and storing excess water so that in future times of drought and flood we don’t have to switch water management policy direction 360 degrees at a time. Let’s have joined up policy and the actions and funding to manage our water sustainably.”

Professor Stuart Lane from Durham University’s Institute of Hazard and Risk, said:

“These floods are very unusual. As with the River Don floods in late June, these are ‘mid-catchment’, meaning heavy rain falling, not in the uplands, as is normal, but in the middle parts of river basins. This is exacerbated by problems of urban drainage systems being unable to cope with flood volumes. However simply designing better drainage systems is unlikely to make a material difference as the water has nowhere to drain to because the rivers are full to capacity. This may be an example of floods that we have to learn to live with, through developing the resilience of urban infrastructure to flooding.”

Professor Kevin G Kerr, Consultant Microbiologist/Hon Clinical Professor of Microbiology, Harrogate District Hospital, said:

“Some areas of the world experience serious outbreaks of diseases such as cholera and typhoid after major flooding, but large-scale outbreaks of infection would be very unlikely in the UK, partly because these diseases are very rare in this country but mainly because water companies are able to provide clean drinking water –either bottled or from bowsers – to people without tap water.”

in this section

filter RoundUps by year

search by tag