British floods

Floods claim fourth life and leave worst insurance bills for five years

Firefighters recover the body of an elderly woman from her flooded house in the devastated centre of St Asaph, north Wales

the Guardian,

27 November, 2012

 in Britain has claimed a fourth life and brought misery to hundreds more homes, as torrential rain moves away into the North Sea leaving the worst insurance bills for five years in its wake.

Firefighters in the devastated centre of St Asaph, the small but historic north Wales community which was given city status by the Queen to mark her Diamond Jubilee, recovered the body of an elderly woman from her flooded house, one of 500 local properties damaged or evacuated.

The tragedy follows drownings in the West Country earlier in three days of downpours and floods which have seen the number of damaged houses top the 1100 mark. Emergency teams remain on duty at Malton and Norton in North Yorkshire, where six pumps are keeping the river Derwent at bay, and in York where the river Ouse is expected to peak on the morning of Wednesday 28 November.

The historic city is used to flooding in streets beside the river, which bisects the walled core, but a complex defence system involving the smaller river Foss holds all but exceptionally high water at bay. Extra sandbags were deployed by the York Flood Group, an emergency command structure convened when the Ouse rises by over four metres for more than a day.

The Environment Agency repeated warnings elsewhere that the break-up of solid downpours into fragmented showers did not mean that the threat of flooding was over. On Tuesday there were 181 flood warnings and 216 flood alerts covering the whole of England, with the highest total (111) in the Midlands and the smallest (6) in the usually damp north west which this time lay just to the north of the path of the wet fronts. Rising levels in the river Severn and the Thames from Oxford downstream have emergency teams on standby.

John Curtin, Environment Agency head of incident management said: "Further flooding is expected in the next few days and communities across the country, particularly in north east England, north Wales and Northamptonshire, are urged to remain especially vigilant."

The heaviest insurance bill since 2007 has been estimated by the accountancy firm PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) which suggests that damage from flooding so far this year is likely to reach £1bn, compared with losses of £3bn in 2007 when successive severe floods across England and Wales forced thousands of people from their homes.

Mohammad Khan, insurance partner at PwC, said the period from April to June was the wettest since records began and insurance losses from the flooding were then estimated at £500m. Using summer flood damage as a proxy to the recent flooding across the UK, he estimates the total cost this year to now add up to around £1bn.

Since the 2007 floods, the Environment Agency has become more active and more people have signed up to its text message alerts, meaning they are better prepared when the worst weather hits.

But talks between the government and the industry have hit a deadlock. The ABI called on the government to do its bit to ensure affordable flood insurance for high-risk households, following the government's refusal to provide a temporary overdraft facility to a proposed not-for-profit special insurance fund for 200,000 high-risk households. This would be used to pay claims if there were 2007-style floods in the early years of the scheme before it had built up its reserves.

"No country in the world has a free market for flood insurance with high levels of affordable cover without some form of government involvement," said the ABI's director general Nick Starling.

The prime minister, David Cameron, visited the village of Buckfastleigh in Devon, which suffered flash flooding after torrential rain at the weekend.

He said: "It is obviously very traumatic when communities are hit by flooding like this but what I found are people are incredibly steadfast and have behaved incredibly bravely at handling the flood and now we need to help them with the recovery.

"We have to make sure their insurance pays out, make sure the Environment Agency puts in place good flood defences, make sure there are better warning schemes. There are always lessons to learn and I wanted to come here and hear it for myself."

He defended the coalition government's record on flood defences in spite of cuts at the Environment Agency overall and in the flood budget specifically. He said: "We are spending over £2 billion on flood defences over the current four-year period, which is 6% less than was spent over the previous four years. As well as that, we are actually encouraging private and other money into flood defences and making sure they are more efficient as we build them. I am convinced we are going to provide flood defences for another extra 145,000 homes over the period ahead."

The Environment Agency said that defences had generally held up well although unusual conditions outwitted some, especially the back-up of drains from land saturated by one of the wettest summers on record. This caused flooding to three properties in Malton where £9.3 million defences finished in 2002, two years after disastrous flooding swamped 400 homes, have generally proved effective.

Transport disruption also defied the emergency services' best efforts with standing water from the sheer scale and persistence of the rainfall bringing major roads and rail services to a halt. The East Coast mainline is getting back to normal after almost a day's breakdown of services between London, York and Scotland and the A1M, whose three day closure after flooding in September cost the economy a estimated £250 million, was only briefly shut in one direction at Catterick in North Yorkshire during the worst of the weather.