The British floods - update

Having neglected the West country now that the floods have reached his own backyard, David Cameron is offering “whatever it takes” and unlimted money

UK floods: severe warnings issued along Thames, with more rain to come

Environment Agency warns of danger to life in Berkshire, Surrey and Somerset, as Met Office warns of more rain

Follow live updates on the flooding crisis




the Guardian,

10 February, 2014

Sixteen severe flood warnings have been issued for southern England, with another band of strong winds and heavy rains set to lash Britain on Monday night.

The Environment Agency has issued 14 warnings of danger to life along the Thames, focusing on Berkshire and Surrey, with the remaining two applying to areas already devastated by flooding in the Somerset Levels. A further 141 flood warnings, indicating less serious risk, are also in place.

The Thames flood barrier has been closed for the 28th time this winter – the most since it was constructed – and severe warnings stretch along the river from Datchet to Shepperton Green, including Hamm Court and Chertsey. While the Environment Agency continues to pump water from flood-affected communities in Somerset, where rainfall overnight on Sunday saw levels rise still further, a spokesman said the agency's "main focus" was now on the Thames.

The warnings came as the political row over responsibility for the failure to dredge deepened. On Monday morning, the agency's chairman, Lord Smith, blamed Treasury spending rules for the agency's failure to spend more on dredging last year, and said his staff knew 100 times more than any politician about flood defence. Smith, responding to criticism from communities secretary Eric Pickles, also pointed out that, by contrast, the environment secretary, Owen Paterson, had been hugely supportive.

The deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg, on a visit to flood-stricken Burrowbridge in Somerset on Monday, also entered the row. He offered partial support to Smith, telling Sky News: "I don't think now is the time to point the finger of blame. Chris Smith and the Environment Agency have got a very difficult job to do. We can in the future look back and decide what went right and what went wrong. It is very clear, for instance, now that the calls here locally for the dredging of some of the local rivers, while it wouldn't have been a magic wand solution, clearly should have been done." David Cameron is also due to visit the south-west on Monday.

Flooding in Datchet, a village next to the river Thames near Windsor in Berkshire, forced National Rail to cancel trains on Monday morning and also prevented a replacement bus service being provided.

Services between Oxford and Radley have also been disrupted, while the rail link to the south-west remains completely cut off.

Network Rail is using shipping containers filled with rubble to provide a breakwater at Dawlish, where the mangled mainline to Cornwall was left dangling over the sea when the seawall was washed away last week.

Royal Marines from 40 Commando helped to prepare a further 20,000 sandbags for use in Somerset over the weekend. The Ministry of Defence has put 1,600 personnel on six hours' notice to help in the south.

The Met Office has issued a yellow warning for rain from Tuesday until Thursday covering most of southern England, the Midlands and Wales. It is forecasting that there could be over 30mm of rain across parts of south Wales and south-west England on Tuesday.

Here is a summary of the day's events from the Guardian Live Updates

Summary

Welcome to our live coverage of the worsening floods crisis and the increasingly bitter political row over ways of tackling the problem.

Here’s a summary of the main developments:

• The Environment Agency has issued 14 severe flood warnings along the Thames and still has two severe warnings in place for the Somerset Levels. A further 146 flood warnings are in place in the rest of the country.

• The Met Office has an amber warning for rain from Tuesday until Thursday covering most of southern England, the Midlands and Wales. It says another band of strong winds and heavy rains is set to hit Britain on Monday night. Up to 30mm of rain is predicted for the already waterlogged south-west and Wales.

• Lord Smith, the beleaguered head of the Environment Agency, has abandoned his diplomatic approach to the crisis by hitting back at government sniping of his agency. In an article for the Guardian, Smith, a former Labour cabinet minister, said:

In a lifetime in public life, I’ve never seen the same sort of storm of background briefing, personal sniping and media frenzy getting in the way of decent people doing a valiant job trying to cope with unprecedented natural forces.

• The communities secretary, Eric Pickles, said the government had relied “too much” on the “wrong-headed” advice of the Environment Agency not to dredge the Somerset Levels. Speaking on the BBC’s Andrew Marr show, Pickles was asked whether Smith should resign. He said: “Its a matter for him. It has been an unhappy time for Lord Smith and no doubt his lordship is reflecting on the feedback he has got from the people of Somerset. At least the Environment Agency will not need to organise a focus group to understand what people think.”

• The Thames flood barrier has been closed again as Royal Marines shore up vulnerable communities further up the river. The barrier has been closed 28 times this winter – its busiest period since it was constructed.

• The rail link to the south-west remains completely cut off. Network Rail is using shipping containers filled with rubble to provide a breakwater at Dawlish where the mangled mainline to Cornwall was left dangling over the sea when the seawall was washed away last week.

Dawlish: waves crash over the main Exeter-to-Plymouth railway line, which has been closed. Photograph: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

Some of Wales' coastal towns 'face being abandoned'

Coastal communities in Wales are being warned they could face being abandoned in future.

Some councils say rising sea levels mean they are too expensive to defend in the long term.

They have told BBC Wales that plans are already in place to retreat.

But Natural Resources Minister Alun Davies said managed retreat was not part of his strategy.

Further north, in the Midlands, the river Severn is in flood

More on the Thames floods

Lapping at the Queen's doorstep: As floods hit Windsor, nearby villagers flee homes swamped by the swollen Thames

 Royal washout: Swans and geese take advantage of the new lake that formed below Windsor Castle

Daily Mail,

10 February, 2014

The Thurner family set sail from the front steps of their Victorian home in glorious midday sunshine, stepping into a small kayak that had been rowed up the high street of the normally idyllic commuter village of Datchet.

Daughters Beatrix, Scarlet and Marina were lifted carefully into the precariously-bobbing vessel, before a bowl of Pedigree Chum was placed inside the hull to convince Ruby, a young boxer dog, to join them.

Last of all came mum Sian and dad Robert, carrying suitcases which contain the provisions which must sustain them until the murky flood waters covering half of Berkshire subside.

Waiting: A royal lodge at Windsor Castle by Albert Bridge in Windsor, about to be overcome by flooding

‘I bought this canoe so we could go up and down the Thames at weekends, and have the occasional picnic,’ said Robert, a marketing consultant. ‘I never realised I’d be using it to evacuate my home.

‘We’re getting out because this house has no back door and the front is going to be inaccessible pretty soon, which will leave us with no way in or out. So for safety’s sake, we’ve decided to make a move.’

Before rowing away from the home they have owned since 2003, Mr Thurner, 46, had moved furniture upstairs, emptied the wine cellar, and built a wall of orange sandbags across his front door.

Similar defences were being mounted across Datchet yesterday, as families decided whether to stay put or head to higher ground, as the flood waters edged slowly but relentlessly higher.

More than 200 Royal Navy engineers, tens of thousands of sandbags, and a 600m flood wall have been employed to protect this village of three pubs, a church, and 5,000 residents situated a few miles downstream from Windsor Castle.

But as the day wore on, it became increasingly apparent that their best efforts would not be enough to prevent a disaster of some form.

Water had begun to trickle down the high street shortly after midnight, after breaching a flood wall to the north of the village. By breakfast time, it had turned the railway line into a canal.

Train services into Waterloo, on one of the county’s busiest commuter lines, will be out for at least a week. The cost of repairs and lost business: tens of millions.

On the village green, a small puddle was turning into a lake, closing the main road and submerging park benches. By the afternoon, water was lapping its way up the war memorial and slopping its way into low-lying homes.

A panoramic view of the deluged streets of Datchet in Berkshire, where locals face weeks of misery

A public health crisis is all but inevitable, since sewage treatment works upstream at Marlow and Cookham were swamped over the weekend, disgorging their contents into the Thames. The occasional whiff of effluent attested to the fact that sewage had found its way into the village, where dirty water is expected to remain for at least a week after the flood peaks.

‘It’s contaminated the whole of the riverside,’ says Ian Thompson, a parish councillor. ‘You can see white gunge everywhere. We’ve got contamination everywhere. It’s disgusting.’

More worrying, perhaps, was the sight of youths rolling up their trousers to wade through the filthy torrent. ‘I had a word with a couple of ladies to control their kids,’ adds Mr Thompson. ‘I said, “don’t you know they’re walking in raw sewage?”

'People have no idea. Schools are shut, and they all think it’s a big fun day out. It’s all a game for them.’

There was certainly a bizarre sort of carnival atmosphere in Datchet yesterday, as younger residents enjoyed being at the centre of an international media circus.

A handful of teenagers used rubber dinghies to sail into the backdrop of the BBC’s rolling news cameras, or tied bin liners around their legs and waded to a partially-submerged royal jubilee memorial in the middle of the green.

The older locals weren’t laughing, though. With water from the weekend storms expected to arrive in Berkshire today, homeowners are steeling themselves for weeks of damage and disruption.

Little wonder, then, that David Cameron’s occasional appearances on the village pub’s rolling news screen prompted cries of ‘too little, too late’ from patrons.

The real venom, however, was shared for the small number of Environment Agency staff who somewhat sheepishly appeared at lunchtime, wielding clipboard and wearing high-viz jackets, to ‘advise’ locals how to protect their homes.

Soaked station: A railway line near the village was virtually turned into a river

In the eyes of anyone who has lived in Datchet more than a few years, the village’s plight is unequivocally the fault of the embattled agency.

At fault, they say, is the EA’s decision, in the Blair era of the late 1990s, to green-light construction of the ‘Jubilee River’, an artificial waterway designed to prevent flooding in the upstream towns of Maidenhead and Windsor.

The seven-mile channel effectively splits the Thames in two, creating a relief channel which protects Berkshire’s major population centres.

But where the Jubilee River ends, the two waterways are effectively channelled back into one, creating a ‘pinch point’, below which villagers say there is now a dramatically increased risk of flooding.

And that point is just a few hundred yards upstream of Datchet.

Before the Jubilee River opened in 2002, Datchet hadn’t seen a major flood since 1947. It has now been flooded three times in just over a decade.

‘When they built the Jubilee River, there was a big public inquiry, and the Environment Agency and their hydrogologists came along and claimed there’d be no extra risk of flooding here, because their computer model told them,’ says Roc Di Millio, who has lived in the village for 30 years.

‘We always knew they were talking rubbish, and now it’s just a case of “I told you so”. They’re totally incompetent.’

After the 2003 flood, the agency agreed to build a flood barrier to the north of Datchet. But with the Thames now nearly 12ft higher than usual, that line of defences failed late on Sunday night.

Mr Thompson says Datchet and surrounding villages have been ‘sacrificed’ protect larger, wealthier towns upstream.

The playing fields of Eton College, two miles away, where the Battle of Waterloo was famously said to have been won, are now suitable for a re-enactment of Trafalgar. The Queen’s dairy farm in Windsor Great Park, which is home to Windsor Castle, is submerged, and several of her servants’ grace-and-favour cottages have water lapping at the walls.

At teatime, Robert Thurner paddled back to his front door, to rearrange sandbags and place a ‘lucky’ toy – a model of Noah’s Ark – on the front steps.

‘We’ve known this was coming for weeks,’ he said.

‘So here’s what I don’t understand. In Holland and other countries where large amounts of the land are below sea level, they seem to be able to deal with heavy rain and rising tides. Here, in Berkshire, we are above sea level. So why can’t we seem to deal with it?’

The flooding and storms that have brought misery to thousands have been described as the worst on record.

But 60 years ago a much greater disaster – in terms of both deaths and destruction – hit the UK.

On January 31, 1953, the storm of the century claimed more than 300 lives in Britain’s worst peacetime disaster.

Many died in their beds, others were swept away by the raging torrents or perished from the cold as they clung to their rooftops waiting to be rescued.

For 18 hours, force 11 storms and high spring tides combined to smash sea defences, flood more than 150,000 acres of land and wreak £1.2billion of damage (at today’s prices) along the east coast.

Lack of a national warning system meant that whole communities were unaware of the threat. Some 307 people lost their lives in England and 19 in Scotland – a death toll comparable to the worst nights of the Blitz.

Lincolnshire, Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex and Kent were the worst affected.

Canvey Island in Essex sustained the largest loss of life, with 59 killed when a storm surge hit homes.

The storm began on the west coast of Ireland before passing over Orkney and then down the North Sea.

Water poured through the unfinished sea wall in Cleethorpes, Lincolnshire, flooding 1,500 homes, and a tidal surge swept over the sea walls in King’s Lynn, Norfolk, and into 400 homes.

Across the UK, 32,000 were evacuated, while 160,000 acres of farmland were rendered useless for years.

Radio coverage

River Thames floods

UK flood misery worsens: River Thames bursts its banks

The River Thames has burst its banks after reaching its highest level in years, flooding riverside towns upstream of London.

NZ Herald,

11 February, 2013

Residents and British troops piled up sandbags to protect properties from the latest bout of flooding, but the river overwhelmed their defences in several places, leaving areas including the center of the village of Datchet underwater.

The Environment Agency has issued 14 severe flood warnings meaning there's a danger to life along the Thames east of Windsor, about 32 kilometres from London.

Its chief executive, Paul Leinster, said "extreme weather will continue to threaten communities this week" with more Thames flooding expected tomorrow.

There were no flood alerts for the part of the river that flows through London. That stretch is protected by the Thames Barrier, a series of giant metal gates downstream of central London that can be closed against tidal surges. By holding back the tide, the barrier also creates more space in the river for excess water from upstream to flow down to the sea.

England has had its wettest January since 1766. Its southwest coast has been battered repeatedly by storms and a large area of the low-lying Somerset Levels in the southwest has been under water for more than a month.

The disaster has sparked a political storm, with the Prime Minister David Cameron's Conservative-led government facing criticism from many residents for allegedly failing to dredge rivers and take other flood-prevention measures.

Both Cameron and Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg visited flood-hit areas yesterday as the government struggled to take charge of the flooding crisis.

Cameron denied the government had been slow to respond.

"We have been dealing with it from the very moment it started," he said. "Where money was needed, we provided more money. Where military was needed, I made sure the military was deployed."

This is an excellent report. The correspondant says that people's homes are being flooded from below - by the rising water table.

There is talk of parts of flooded Somerset being given back to the sea