Farmers have some of the most fertile land going. In no small part because it floods and gets covered with mineral rich alluvial soil.
People stupid enough to buy houses on flood plains without considering the possibility of flooding are as much to blame as the developers imho.
Surely the fault lies with the planners allowing building on flood plains? There is a desperate shortage of houses.. people have to live somewhere.
Good post BigGriffin
Lets go further. Why arent the big rivers dredged by large dredgers.? If there is a convern over nature do the left one year and the right the next.
Why not build cast concrete walls rather than relying on temporary metal barriers.?
There is an interesting item on euronews.com of the future of farming in Europe. Maybe Boris is right about abandoning farmers and buying all our food in. Not sure how that would work in a war........
Yes, both you Varche and DG are right on that one.
Far too often houses are being built where they should never be, and stupid people are buying them even though any intelligence they have should tell them flooding is a very real possibility. In those cases it may well be very difficult, if not impossible, to get building or contents insurance . But still they build them and people buy them.
This we are seeing around Ashford, where whole swathes of flood plain have been built on. However, as you say Varche, people need housing; they must live somewhere. But thanks to the NIMBY lobby so often it can prove very difficult to build houses on large amounts of land. This is another real problem down here in the South East.
As for the existing houses built on flood plain, and the correct observation by biggriffen about farmers clearing ditches, we are where we are and there MUST be a dramatic re-think of government policy. It is impossible for the Environment Agency to build flood protection schemes everywhere, so yes the ditches, streams and rivers must be made to cope with additional amounts of water. Many farmers have commented how dredging of rivers has not been done in recent years, due to cuts/willpower, but they cannot physically do more than clear their own drainage ditches.
With Climate Change a fact, no matter how caused, it is also fact that the atmosphere is holding far more moisture than in recent times at least, so we are getting a higher amount of rainfall (in the South East alone February 2020 was the wettest since records began, by a massive degree) . So central action is now required to allow high levels of spending to assist all relevant parties to act on building the required measures to keep the land drained as much as possible, whilst ceasing the building of homes on any land at risk of flooding. No one can act like a King Canute (who actually knew he could not hold back the sea, but was proving a point about the limitations of him as a King - a lesson those home owners complaining about the Environment Agency / Government could take on board!) but action now, in addition to measures already being taken, is a solution.
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Topic: Anti thumberg (Read 8650 times)