Which is where the thread started... Climate change is probably survivable, but we need a different approach to how we organize infrastructure and as has been clearly pointed out, emergency services.
I mean, we have this 'landfill problem'
Why not pile it up outside these council offices that have a flood problem?
Kills three birds with one stone..
- it creates a flood proof levee.
- it gets rid of the toxic waste.
- with luck the bastards will die of pollution and we can put in something fit for purpose.
All new infrastructure should be able to withstand a 120mph hurricane and flooding up to 15 feet., if remotely near a floodplain.
The primary role of government is to stay in power.
Personally I shudder to think how the same people in charge of planning on how to cope with the flow of water off the projected new developments (if they have), will be the same ones who've planned the flow of traffic in and around Cambridge.
AFAIK there was quite a lot of work put into schemes to cope with floods in Cambridge in the 90s (I had a wander down one of the tunnels one night while they were being built).
And personally I've never had a problem getting into or around Cambridge. Though I did have the advantage of knowing that trying to get a car around there during daytime has always been a foolish pursuit, so avoided it.
Yeah but you have a choice whether to take a car into Cambridge or not. I avoid Cambridge from now on full stop.
No-ones' got a choice about how often or how much it rains (a lot more due to climate change) or, to my satisfaction, has explained where all the water that's going to run off the new hard surfaces is going to go.
One of the football teams is apparently moving to a new edge-of-town site soon. Not sure what they are going to do with the site, but despite the current massive oversupply round here I suspect they'll be trying to convert it into housing. In any event all three have been there for A Very Long Time, and well before "planning" would have been a consideration in locating them. I suspect they all settled there on the basis of having a nice level [1] playing field (ho hum) next to the main road.
[1] It rises quite steeply to both the north and south, and east-west is along the same river, but not close to the main road.
Yes I have but is it practical to do that elsewhere and is it ideal for housing?>..
Well that will change when people find they can't get house insurance and builders won't build on them as they will be sued if the they do flood and existing housing in flood risk areas will be blighted.
I re insured a house the other day, almost every question was about flooding!, where we were, near to rivers , any history of flooding etc, etc..
The point is that people tend to want to live near established settlements. For historical reasons, established settlements tend to be built on or near flood plains.
It seems to me to be valuation by "society" (not that I believe in the concept of "society") not being there.
At one stage in my early career, I was a member of the IEE. I even went to a few of their meetings. There was even encouragement by my then employer to pursue their Chartered Engineer track.
It didn't take long to realise that unless one was going to work on something to do with government contracts or in the electricity supply industry, that this had little relevance and in some respects could even be a downer on career prospects.
I think that the last time I had the word "engineer" in my job title was about 25 years ago.
Also, in some respects, the term is too loose. One example of possible exceptions to that are in the IT industry where there is a plethora of manufacturer sponsored and created qualifications and labels that go with them. Whether they actually imply an ability to think and do the job is another matter. I have to say that I am sceptical on that point. Nonetheless a market is created.
However, if you think about it, all of the great names mentioned were celebrities and have been remembered because they were individual thinkers. Collectivism in all of its various, cancerous forms has stifled that, with political correctness being the icing on the cake. Protection of intellectual property has been another killer.
After that, it is complexity and specialisation. For example, Baird is credited with the invention of television - we'll leave to one side the merits of that - but he is.
OTOH, I would be reasonably willing to bet that you have heard the name Claude Shannon. I doubt whether many people in engineering outside of the communications world would have done, let alone the man in the street. Arguably, Shannon's work was far more significant than Baird's but the commercial connection would be far harder for the layman to understand.
Finance and a war. We gave it all to the yanks in return for a massive loan that we have only just repaid, and later on, governments decided we didn't need it anyway, (we could buy it back from the yanks anyway) so they cancelled all the high tech stuff.
Its because this country has been historically run by first, the landed gentry, and then when they lost their power, the financial institutions.
The final death knell was the Unions and Maggie, who between them destroyed what little was left.
Exactement. The cost of - say - putting in new infrastructure half way up a mountain in Scotland to build a village that no one would want to live in..
No one wants a house there: They want a house - a cheap house, in London within walking distance of wherever their job is, and Tescos.
================================== I think the unions contributed a great deal to their own demise long before Maggie by their rigid 'demarcation' attitudes. Remember those weeks of strikes in the 1960s when plumbers and joiners brought ship building to a stand still by their inter union dispute about who should drill holes for copper plumbing pipes in wooden cabin walls.
To-day many tradesmen are proud to call themselves 'multi-skilled', much as they were in the 19th century.
In message , at 10:38:28 on Wed, 25 Jul 2007, David Hansen remarked:
They did a lot of work following the 1947 floods (the river Trent there, despite being as wide as the Thames in west London, is virtually canalised) and recently they repaired all of that and raised the walls by 0.8 metre. So fingers crossed. I came over Trent Bridge earlier and the water perhaps 20ft at least below the top of the banks - so no problems currently.
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