Anyone here flooded out?

[Bill Wright]

Or you could just make sure your house is on higher ground.

Bill

[alan]

Around my way there are two developments on previously marshy ground. In both cases before building started they dug _very_ large holes for pools (which will become parts of a nature reserve/parks). They then shipped in earth and built up the land to an extra 6 to 10 feet depth.

[Martin Brown]

It is not as subtle as that. There are new build projects as we speak on land that is currently inundated and stopped work in progress.

*EVERY* local knows that the land floods badly once a decade, but the poor incoming suckers have no idea. You can only feel very sorry for them when the winter is very wet and new build flooded horribly.

It doesn't stop well known developers cynically building on land that they know will flood. It is not a case of if but when...

If you build on flood plains or in saucer shaped depressions that every local knows will flood badly then it is no surprise when it happens.

I do feel very sorry for the poor sods that are stuck in the Somerset levels but they are living on borrowed time on land below sea level. Climate change means rising sea levels and more powerful winter storms with accompanying precipitation. The game plan now has to be for a managed retreat it is not cost effective to protect land below sea level in the UK. It isn't like the Netherlands where hardly any land is above sea level and a mediocre hill is a major tourist attraction.

That it has flooded so badly this year is Gods judgement on Cameron for appointing a climate change denier as "environment secretary" (with apologies to the deranged ex Tory kipper lunatic that claimed it was all because of gay marriage). BTW who detached his retina ?

Was it a sucker punch from Cameron to take charge of the Cobra?

The new unholy Tory & kipper alliance logo is unveiled:

[Tim Streater]

As in the Nine Tailors.

[The Natural Philosopher]

That is an extraordinarily simple thing to do that it should be part of planning permission being granted

The soil removed from the pond becomes the high ground backfill.

Then you simply start te houses and go up 5 feet before the ground floor. When finished heap the spoil against the exposed walls. Its what I did here, but only up to about 18".

[Peter Crosland]

You really have not done you research very well have you? Nearly all the Somerset Levels is actually above sea level by four to six metres. Just like much of Holland the area has been drained for hundreds of years. The main water courses are in embankments above the surrounding land and system of pumps keeps the land drained to different levels according to the time of year.

What has happened is that there have been two years in succession that the rainfall has been more than that might be expected once in a hundred years. Added to this there has been a deliberate policy of the Environment Agency to cease dredging of the main watercourses and indeed many smaller ones. It is normal for some areas of the levels to flood in winter and that is managed by the drainage boards and the EA. What is quite abnormal is for the capacity of the main watercourses to carry the water away quicker than it fills up the areas designed to flood.

Many of the flooded properties have been there for hundreds of years and seldom, if ever, flooded. Having been born on, as well as lived and worked on the levels for most of my life what has been evident this years is the many areas flooded that have not been for sixty or more years. There has certainly been no widespread development in the area. The current area receiving so much attention around Moorland is quite different from that at Muchelney. In the latter case very few properties have been flooded but the three access roads have been impassable for weeks.

Sadly until the rain abates dredging is not possible and pumping is often limited by the amount of water running down the rivers as well as the incoming tides.

[Roger Mills]

Gawd! How deep are the foundations?

[tony sayer]

Thatcher hasn't been blamed as yet.

After all if those mines had had all that coal removed the water could piss off down there;)...

Seriously I just hope we aren't in for a big freeze before it does go down, the prospect of all that water freezing around a house will I expect damage the foundations around the damp level course ...

[tony sayer]

And one of their lot sorted out the Fens and that seems to work very well?...

[Peter Crosland]

The first drainage of the Somerset Levels was at least a thousand years ago. This link gives a brief account.

The Dutch were involved in improving the drainage in the 17th century.

Some of the works are still in use albeit they have been reinforced. The most recent major works of the kind were carried out by the EA on the Baltmoor Wall.

[Tim Streater]

Well, that can happen. It doesn't, in and of itself, prove anything.

It's still unclear to me how much this would have helped. The media seem to be being vague on this one.

Is the result, then, in line? That is, we have a once-in-a-100-year rain, do we expect to get a once-in-a-100-year flood?

[Tim Streater]

The implication in the Nine Tailors was, IIRC, that it had been done piecemeal and therefore not very well. But that may just have been so the story made sense.

A local MP told me that with the peat eroding due to farming, it (the peat) will all be gone in 100 (?) years after which there'll be no point in continuing to pump out the fens. In which case it can go back to marsh. But that'll be long after our time.

[Capitol]

There's no shortage of land for houses or infrastructure, you just build them north of York.

[Brian Gaff]

What I do not understand about water tables is what happens when you are on top of a hill, yet during the worse times over Christmas, water was apparently coming up through the lawn after it had stopped raining. Surely, it should all be going downhil, not uphill? Its not happened since to my knowledge, so its hard to say what was going on. Brian

[LumpHammer]

Does the built up land require lots of compaction before it's built on? Do the foundations of the new buildings go all the way down to the pre-existing ground?

I thought building on "made-up" land was frowned upon because it's likely to settle over the years and cause structural problems in buildings on top of it?

[dennis]

No we aren't short of land. There is plenty of land that could be built on that isn't a flood plain.

As for infrastructure, well they could build some more, paid for by a building tax so those that need the new infrastructure pay for it.

[dennis]

Its also the flood prevention schemes that makes it flood further down. They seldom build lakes to buffer the flood and just speed up the flow by building walls or dredging.

If they dredge the rivers in Somerset then it will just let storm surges get in quicker and further.

[Tim Lamb]

In message , Tim Streater writes

Umm.. I think that may be due to some indoctrination undergone by planners during training: mustn't build where it can be seen! Hill top developments can be under what used to be called *exception 32* conditions where low cost/social housing is permitted but private dwellings would be refused.

>

[mogga]

Hydrogen bonds. That was the answer we always used to give when H2O didn't do what it should have done.

[mogga]

Parts of East Anglia could be abandoned to the sea forever after recent floods