Amid the wreckage of this week’s floods the most depressing comment came from a government scientist who called for a national register of bridges. If we had a register, he argued, the relevant authorities might in future be better able to predict which bridges are likely to go the same way as Workington’s two went this week. And this — as well as blaming climate change — is how the government machine avoids a glaringly obvious problem.
Britain is not short of databases. On the contrary, the taxpayer is groaning under the weight of them. What the country is desperately short of, on the other hand, is decent roads, railways and bridges that will actually withstand the odd rainstorm. There is little point in creating a Domesday Book of crumbling arches if the government is not prepared to do anything to replace them. And having not done so during the boom years, there is precious little chance of it doing so during the recession.
The lesson of these floods, as with those of 2007, is that Britain is unprepared for abnormal rainfall. Shortly before the 2007 floods the Audit Commission produced a devastating report on the poor state of the nation’s flood defences: 54 per cent of flood walls, it concluded, could not be guaranteed to hold back waters of a level against which they had been designed to defend. This week, the results of this abject failure of government planning came pouring into the drawing rooms of England again.
Blaming carbon emissions, as ministers were trying to do this week, is a cop-out. With or without climate change Britain will be battered by extreme weather. It always has been. Yet far from preparing the country against deluge the government actually cut the flood defence budget. Banbury, which flooded badly ten years ago, was due to have a £12 million flood relief scheme — but it was cancelled after £1 million had been spent preparing it. The money saved was a pittance compared with the cost of the floods, estimated at about £1.5 billion in direct and indirect damage.
Cockermouth would not have suffered so badly this week had the River Derwent been dredged and a bypass channel dug, as the Environment Agency had been asked to do. They decided against it on the grounds of a predicted adverse effect on wildlife. The two halves of Workington would not now be cut off from each other if the town had a bypass with a modern concrete single-span bridge. Instead, this port and industrial town of 25,000 people had to make do with two narrow stone bridges built long before the existence of the heavy lorries which now rely on them to gain access to West Cumbria’s industrial fringe — which includes a nuclear power station and reprocessing works.
The Dutch build their river defences to a standard which will defend against the water levels expected once every 1,250 years. In Britain, if we build them at all, we build them to a one-in-100-year standard. And then we build large housing estates directly behind them, many of whose unsuspecting buyers are destined to have their homes flooded before the mortgage is paid off.
Soon there will probably be a Conservative government, coming to office on a mission to cut government spending by some 15 per cent. Infrastructure will be just as tempting a cuts target for David Cameron as it was for Gordon Brown: cut it, and one does not notice the pain this year. Or next. One notices it only when the next rainstorm arrives, or train crash occurs. Far easier, politically, to protect the NHS budget — even when you know the greatest savings are to be found there. This may be the age of information and, indeed, austerity, but as last week’s weather shows that doesn’t obviate the need for civil engineering.
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