Article in Guardian moots lower insurance premiums for those installing flood defences. Question is what type of flood defences would be most effective. Blocking widows air vents and doors, yes, but how would one deal with a rise in the water table?
Surely it's better for the environment to have one scheme protecting
1,000 houses than 1,000 schemes protecting 1,000 houses ?Clearly the planet can't be that much at risk if we can piss away carbon on this sort of nonsense.
Or save money on flood defences by not building in inappropriate places!
You say 'surely', as if it were obvious, but I don't think it is. A metal plate that slides into a housing will protect your front door and cost maybe £30. Repeat that around the house, and you can probably do a decent job for a couple of hundred pounds.
Of course, you also have to drive your car to higher ground, so it's less convenient than protecting the whole area.
Really, we shouldn't be building on flood plains, but we do.
I wouldn't call Bridgenorth a flood plain
Now you're just being silly.
Although the standard of new builds these days are quite flood friendly - I assume they just wash away when the water flows ....
Or by dredging. Bill
If you mean Bridgnorth, do you mean high town or low town?
Bill
In insurance speak, this likely means not increasing your premiums quite so much if you spend far more than any likely savings in that.
When in Shropshire my Sat Nav failed to find Bridgenorth :)
He cannot mean high town with that climb :) Any land that is relatively flat next to a river is likely to have been a flood plain and even with flood defences still likely to be so. Who builds houses close to a river that is known to rise by 15+ feet during heavy rain.
In message snipped-for-privacy@mid.individual.net>, alan_m snipped-for-privacy@admac.myzen.co.uk> writes
Not quite as simple as that.
Developer builds properties in a safe area, so no flood prevention work needed.
Later, (possibly decades later) a developer builds properties some distance away, in a place that was acting as part of the natural flood defence by soaking up excess rainfall, then releasing it slowly. That rainfall now has nowhere to go, and the previously safe development now gets flooded. Which set of buildings were built in the inappropriate place, the first or second set ?
Adrian
Also any downstairs drains inside the house where water might come up of course. Maybe we all need to have floating homes? Well since they built on so many flood plains it seems to me that this is where the issue lies. In very old times there was a reason for flood plains. Brian
The answer is of course that flood plain builds should be bunded, but the problem there is where will the water now go? further downstream...
Or accept that a flood plain will in fact flood once every 30 years and build the houses higher out of the ground - say on piles - and let cars get parked underneath...
Thus saving all that on road parking
can build elevated roadways to service them out of soil dug out to make a communal lake for soakaway purposes.
Is a bund round 1000 homes, their gardens, and all the streets likely to be cheaper than protecting the weak points in 1000 individual houses?
Sounds like communism to me.
Probably.
Its just a few days with a big digger or three
If you are digging out foundations, and a communal soakaway. you simply pile the spoil up as a shallow sloped wall. In fact people may pay you to absorb subsoil from other building projects. I ended up building up low bits of my garden when I built the new house and pond.
Plant it with willow and alder and grass and it will be a nice feature in no time
I lived on the Fens where flooding is an every year event...polders exist that are essentially bunded, and the water allowed to flood those, then they are pumped out later on. Cattle are allowed to graze them in summer.
No one builds on them though except te stupid people who put a station car park on one.
In East Anglia we *have* to deal with water management, so we do. And we don't get floods in habitable parts.
I used to live 6 feet *below* the river Cam/Ouse.
Communism would simply ban all media reporting of any natural (or man-made) event that caused harm/expense, so no-one would hear about it apart from word-of-mouth.
I witnessed new houses being built on 'boggy' ground and wondered at the sense of it. (Land was cheap I suppose) Of course the new houses flooded within a short period of time, Before they were even sold and whilst the estate was still being developed. So they constructed a bund. It wasn't big enough and in short order the houses got flooded again. They then had to go further up back stream and build an enormous bunded area controlled by gates to allow them control the flow. Cheap sites my eye.
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