TAKE MORE WATER WITH IT

One of the earliest vivid memories I have is of the flood along the east coast of England on the night of January 31st 1953. I was five. We didn’t live there and we were yet to have a television, so the only images in my head must emanate from press coverage on February 2nd or, even more likely, from my imagination. The vividness comes from the fact that Uncle Bob and Auntie Pat were caught up in it. They lived in King’s Lynn with their little daughter and at least one elderly parent. When we learned that people were being drowned in the town (in the end 15 people there lost their lives), we had to cling to hope of good news. At last we learned that they were all alive and in reasonable spirits, given that their home was overwhelmed by the waters. Later that year, they moved to a new place out of town.

Two thousand people in King’s Lynn were made homeless that night and, along the coastline, 32,000 were evacuated. The deaths in Lincolnshire, Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex totalled 304, with a further 177 – two lifeboatmen, 45 fishermen (we had a fishing industry then) and a ferry full of passengers – lost at sea. In the Netherlands, as many as 1,835 drowned. At King’s Lynn, the sea level rose more than eight feet. Sea defences on the east coast were breached in 1,200 places. In 2003, the cost of this disaster at then values was estimated at £5billion [information from Benfield Hazard Research Centre and Flood London websites].

Of course there have been infinitely worse floods in other parts of the world. In August 1931, the Yellow River in China overwhelmed dozens of townships and an estimated 3.7million perished. Half a million drowned in the cyclone-driven floods of East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), images of which I still recall 37 years after the event. The same area suffered lesser but still murderous devastation 16 years ago [information from The Hutchinson Factfinder, an indispensable volume].

The floods in the North-East, the Midlands and the West are to such vast calamities as a chimney blaze is to The Great Fire of London, though not of course for the families of those individuals who lost their lives. In Texas and other southern and mid-western states, there has been far worse flooding this week than anywhere in Britain. Nonetheless, to have floodwater accompanied by raw sewage cascading through your home is a vile and heart-breaking blow and the cost of making good the damage will be eye-watering. Happily for us, our household was not affected by this week’s flooding. When there were extensive floods in our area three or four years back, a friend asked if we had been caught up in the deluge. “No” I said. “We’re 600 feet above sea level here”. “Ah,” came back my friend, “that’s what they said in Atlantis”.

It’s true that climate change and global warming mean that those places that have always felt safe from rising water have less cause for complacency. But the Yellow River and Bangladesh floods demonstrate that weather can bite deep without any need of help from the carbon emissions endgame. Even so, projections of threat to low-lying areas (starting with the Maldives and great swathes of the Indian subcontinent and the low countries, moving on to New York and London) are real enough. Those of us now dry will not remain unaffected by such developments then – millions will move to higher ground – just as we are not unaffected now: the costs will hit us all.

There has been widespread criticism of government and local authorities on the ground that we were “not prepared”, that cutbacks have postponed attention to flood defences. This is a how-long-is-a-piece-of-string issue. As with the NHS, even if you throw the whole of the GNP at the target, it will still not be enough. Where are the areas in Britain that you can point to and declare with total conviction: “There will be never be flooding here”? How far up the predicted level of rise in the seas can you plan before the whole enterprise is beyond our ability to contemplate? In addition to the cost of attempting (increasingly Canute-like) to hold back the waves, what expenditure can you calculate to be earmarked in order to deal with millions of refugees?

Well, you may say (as I often do) “expenditure is all down to political will. When a government says ‘we can’t afford this’, what it means is ‘we want to spend the money on something else’. Whatever the calls on public finances, prime ministers who are determined to go to war will always manage to find and spend the vast sums that war consumes, however futile that use of the money might seem to everyone else”. But the colossal cost of making every community in Britain safe against any eventuality of freak weather and against any conceivable result of climate change is way beyond a simple matter of rebalancing the budget, however creative Alistair Darling may turn out to be as Chancellor.

I have one of my modest proposals. Let the Brown government commission the most exhaustive study of Britain’s requirement for flood defences in any credible future scenario. Let the exercise be fully costed. Let the rise in the rate of income tax required to finance the building of these defences be calculated. And then let the House have a free vote on the matter so that the people may see what each member feels is the correct response, regardless of calculations about party advantage, having canvassed her own electorate. The voter could not then argue that the government or local authorities were to blame if his home were awash with foul water because his representative would have reflected his view, constituency by threatened constituency. As well as proving an interesting experiment in determining the degree to which short-termism and self-interest inform the electorate’s thinking, the exercise would also provide an unprecedented overview of Britain’s readiness, both physical and psychological, to face a very uncertain future.

A brief PS to the previous entry: I happened to be required this week to record my postal address on a hitherto unvisited website and, as usual, was obliged to click “United Kingdom” as the country of residence. However, when the information was re-presented to me for confirmation, the nation had been magically altered to “GB”. There is still hope.