To feel that the South West has been abandoned (long and ranty)

[zeezeek]

My family still live in Cornwall and they have been completely battered by the wind and the rain for weeks now. Last night they had to be evacuated from their house. The main train line down to Cornwall (in fact also half of Devon) is completely destroyed and a lot of prime agricultural land in Somerset is under water.

People are losing their livelihoods and they have been lucky that there have been no loss of life. In a region where there is already high unemployment - the impact on the farming, fishing and tourist industries will just make the situation worse. Freight trains can no longer get down past Exeter.

The EA are effectively blaming the poor buggers who are affected by this and seemingly forgetting that people and homes are also affected. The government doesn't give a shit and the Environment minister didn't even bother taking a pair of wellington boots with him on his photo opp visit. Our future King made silly comments about how a disaster beings people together while his waste of space daughter in law spends taxpayers money jetting off to the Caribbean. Comments in sensible, intelligent newspapers are also blaming people for daring to live on a flood plain (which has never flooded to this extent) and by the sea.

I know that I am BU, but tonight - when my parents are still not allowed home and my brother has had his fishing boat sunk - I am feeling very, very pissed off with the media who seems to be making such a big deal out of a 2 day tube strike - there are buses.

Sorry, but needed to vent. Have nothing against Londoners - I lived there for years.

North Yorkshire is the biggest county

On March 2nd my family (you may know me as Peachy) are doing a walk for the people of the Levels, some will know I spent the first 30 years of my life in Bridgwater and am still involved with carnival there.

If anyone would like to sponsor us- 5 miles which is a lot as 2 of ours have been diagnosed with ASD and the third being assessed and also has hyperflexible joints, and is aged just 5- please consider donating directly to the appeal fund, here

I am reporting this post so MN know about the fund.

Thank you.

No indeed. But it just is the case that London and the SE dwarfs every other region in terms of population and news will follow that and it gets a bit silly when people get annoyed about the coverage of the tube strike which affected all tube users - ie, almost 3 million people per day - plus everyone else trying to get around London and the greater London area yesterday - probably another 3 million. Something that affects 6 million people will be big news.

That said, the floods and damage to the SW are also, and should be, big news. That is the whole point of this thread and I completely agree. But it gets a bit silly when people become irritated at news stories about the SE that don't affect them when they do actually affect millions of people.

So it is.

Still not more worthy than any other county.Surely if you're part of one big country or family as Cameron likes to put it the biggest aren't more important.We all play a valuable part to the economy and country as a whole.

Never said more worthy. More people. And news is usually about people.

I think the weather report should focus more on troubled areas too. It's much more important ATM to know whether there will be more rain in the south-west in the coming week, and to what likely extent, than to know that there may be some snow in The Grampians, or there may be scattered showers in the East.

Quangle is not saying that the southeast is more important, but that news stories that affect many people tend to get a relatively large amount of coverage, whether those people are in one area or evenly dispersed across the country.

'I am not sure that there was that much that would make economic sense to do. '

Dredging the River Parrett. If that doesn't happen this won't be a 1 in 100 year event, it will be each winter.

It used to be dredged; I used to work out there, I have encountered bad Levels floods but this is something else entirely.

And of course it will affect everyone; farmers are talking about not returning to their land, farm systems and silage has been affected, this is our domestic food industry in a time where we already talk of food prices.

I no longer live in the SW and I thought the coverage between tube strikes (also essential to infrastructure) and the flooding was pretty well balanced on our Welsh regional news.

One of the people moving cattle yesterday was someone I met on mumsnet, and is part of the collection appeal I linked to.

In today's Times (can't link, due to pay wall) the tourist chiefs of Somerset & Devon are saying that they hope all the publicity about the floods won't put people off coming down SW later in the year.

Yes, this agree this situation will affect all of us in the uk - not only food prices but also insurance premiums.

tbh you are only experiencing what we in scotland have known for years - no one cares. every winter since i can remember has been quite bad, apart from maybe the last 2?, yet when it comes to winter and we were up to our knees in snow it was never on the news because it was happening in scotland, miles away from the south. at least this is being covered in the news, across all channels. you also seem to be getting lots of help whereas in scotland we got nothing when the bad winters were here... im sorry i cant help but feel you need to suck it up!

For a long time risk assessments, such as x is expected to be a 1 in 100 year event, hence you would think, oh very small probability not worth spending all that money on - these type of assessment used a Normal distribution. Such a distribution is totally symmetrical (eg likelihood of a very good event is the same as a very bad event) and has long thinnish tails (so probability of an extreme event is very small).

For years now certain groups of statisticians (including at warwick university plus major universities abroad)have warned that the Normal distribution may not be realistic and that you need to use so-called extreme value distributions (statistically this is a totally different ballgame). This has now indeed been proven wrt financial risk asessment (hence the massive financial crisis as banks and regulators chose to stick to the. Ormal distribution and hence massively underestimated the risks they were exposed to) and now we are also seeing it in relation to extreme weather events. It looks that these events may not be as rare as predicted by the normal distribution, so if you were tomadopt an extreme value distribution the likelihood of such an adverse event happening may be many times greater and you would make very different investment decisions.

All this is not new but for a long time there has been a vested interest in using the wrong tools S it seemed to be cheaper.... Yeah until it goes wrong ... And they could have predicted using statistics that that probability was way greater than they acknowledged. Other reason for always sticking to the normal distribution is bad training, it is nice and simple only not very accurate ...

Interestung stuff. Thanks for the info :)

Peggy I'm sorry but that's nonsense. You cannot compare snow with the utter devastation that endless flooding wreaks. It's not the same at all.

And fuck off with your "suck it up". Are you being deliberately offensive?

Watched Chris Smith coming out of his meeting at the Wetlands Centre today.

What a pathetic excuse for a leader!

I'm not personally affected by the floods but his inaction ineffectualness made me mad His plan - to just just 8km of one of the rivers in teh areas. Heavens knows how the people down there who are flooded out must feel. I felt like driving down there to shout at him

He's going to be leaving the post in a few months - why doesn't he just fuck off now and get somebody competent into the role - right now?

He stood there bleating that he had only just been given 4m to dredge the levels and yet his Agency spent 30+ million on a string of nature sacnturies in the areas. I live not far from the affected area and I looked on google maps at the start of this flooding to see this enormous network of man made /engineered ponds/lakes etc staring out at me. WTF is that I thought and zoomed in. Multiple nature reserves carved out of old industrial workings. They are extensive!!!

That's where the money went.

Meanwhile the farmers are selling their cattle at market, for peanuts because the land they should be on is under water and there is nowhere for them to go. Herds built up through generations will be lost.

WTF can't COBRA even organise some temporary grazing for them?

I am so

That's very interesting LoveSewingBee and I can quite see that normal distribution statistics would only be appropriate in some situations.
A classic example might be say the number of matches in a match box where the production line is set up to put an average of 100 matches in each box, but some boxes will contain 99 or 101, and a smaller number may contain 98 or 102 etc etc.
Anyhow, I can quite see that such a distribution model may not be applicable when looking at weather and weather events.
But normal distribution is the one that everyone studying statistics etc.is taught, and the only one most of us really understand.

In today's Times (can't link, due to pay wall) the tourist chiefs of Somerset & Devon are saying that they hope all the publicity about the floods won't put people off coming down SW later in the year.

I hope that was posted for its comedy value. Just as well they are not expecting tourists from the further reaches of the SW where trains no longer exist.

Juggking - you are right most people are only taught th normal distribution and often are not even taught the many limitations.

However, there are Extreme Value Experts at Warwick university (possibly also other universities) so nothing stops the government and its various agencies asking them to help design a robust framework better than all the money they have spent on consultants. Lots of nuclear risk assessment uses these more advanced statistical methods as well, so I expect that all the knowledge will be on their doorstep, they just need to make the shift.

If there are no trains going to the SW people won't just be put off because of that but there is also actually attempting to get down the A38 from Exeter to Plymouth by car. Its usually heaving every summer as it is but if there is no train service is going to be even worse.

I say this as someone who is coming to visit and will be driving from the ferry down to Plymouth.

Don't worry, Peggy. When ALex Salmond's running the show you can have anything you want. ;)

My family live up near Elgin. They have new flood defences now.

Oh god yes, Retropear, the bus service is so expensive in Devon! Hopefully, someone will have the common sense to organise a school bus (or at least free passes) for the time being.

YANBU.

The infrastructure in the South West has been neglected for ages and no-one wants to hear about it. John fecking Humphries I think it was on the Today programme a day or two ago saying that the fact that Cornwall was hard to reach made it so charming, and that we didn't want too many people able to get down there!

HOLIDAY MAKER THINKING, that is the problem. You need completely different qualities (remoteness, lots of empty houses) in a place where you go on holiday, to the qualities (reliable public transport and roads, postal services, local jobs) needed when you live somewhere.

People are saying "You shouldn't buy a house by the sea if you don't want to get flooded". Many people have actually been born in and inherited houses by the sea, or moved nearby because that's where they're from. If everyone moved inland there would be no ports, no harbours, no fishing industry etc because many jobs actually depend on the sea. We're not talking work from home journos or whatever who have decided to buy a dear little cotty in Mevagissey, these are people's homes and their workplaces.

Plus, how many know that there is a European fund that provides investment in the least-developed regions, places with a GDP below 75% of the average in the European Union, and that Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly is the only area in England to qualify. It is an internationally recognised area of poverty and deprivation

And as another poster says, people on the Isles of Scilly (god knows what's happening over there at the moment, no-one can get there to see) have no regular way of getting to/from the mainland as they just have a fixed wing aircraft that can't fly when it's windy/foggy/stormy etc or when the airfields are wet. At the moment the govt is refusing to come up with any funding to restart the very reliable helicopter service which closed 18 months ago. Who's heard about that?

popping in to say I could not agree more!

No time to read the thread as just dropping DSs off to footie training but will check in later.

FWIW I live in a fairly large Cornish town, have struggled to get to work as trains down and minor roads blocked by falling trees but not enough traffic to be a priority fix. We have intermittent power cuts and farmers are struggling to tend their stock.

nEver mind the many homes and businesses under water..but you have to cross a river to get here in the first place, sadly not surprised we have all been forgotten by the westminster cronies [grumpy face]