The Guardian view on Britain’s floods: the reality of climate change
Editorial
If the government is serious about infrastructure, then flood defences should be a greater priority than HS2 or another airport runway
Tuesday 8 December 2015 06.56 AEDT
Last modified on Tuesday 8 December 2015 07.12 AEDT
Winter freeze-ups and phew-what-a-scorcher summers may traditionally have made more dramatic headlines for newspapers, but in Britain the real threat from climate change today comes from flooding. The rains that hit north-west England and southern Scotland over the weekend were certainly exceptional. A record 341.4mm of rain fell at Honister in the Lake District. And the storms had devastating consequences. One man has died, 3,500 homes have been flooded, more than 2,000 of them in Carlisle, while road, rail and power links have all been cut. Yet this year’s floods were hardly unusual.
The floods of December 2015 follow, among many others, floods in 2014 in Somerset and the Thames valley, floods in north Yorkshire and Tyneside in 2012, floods in West Cumberland in 2009, floods in the Severn Valley in 2007 and floods in Carlisle in 2005. This is getting to be almost an annual event. Those who are at the sharp end are entitled to be angry. It is high time we learned the lessons better and got the measure of the problems more thoroughly.
The first thing we need to learn is to stop talking about once-in-a-century risks. Many of the worst affected areas in the current floods are places that have already been through bad floods in the past few years. Several had been equipped with sturdier and more comprehensive flood defences, which have held up against recent but lesser flood threats, as David Cameron was right to point out when he visited Carlisle on Monday.
Yet when the rains came this time those defences were overwhelmed. Cockermouth, on the edge of the Lake District, was inundated in 2009 when eight-foot-deep floods coursed through the town centre. Since then, a £4.4m system of flood barriers has been installed to protect the town from its two rivers. But still the floods came back to Cockermouth at the weekend. For some people in the town, this was the fourth flood in a decade. Things can’t go on like this.
When a house is flooded, the consequences are awful: physical dangers, damaged homes, written-off possessions and insurance claims are just the start of it. That these things should happen at a celebratory time of year – as is the case with many recent floods – is particularly miserable. But the effects endure beyond midwinter, sometimes for years, in the shape of the long clean-up, living in temporary accommodation, delayed insurance claims, increased premiums for householders and businesses, and in the exhaustion and trauma. Those who have experienced one flood will often live in fear of another whenever the heavy rains come. They should not have to do so.