To be fed up with floods and think it's climate change?

[malificent7]

Live and work in Somerset. Can't get home due to floods. This is the 3rd time in 2 months that the commute has been dangerous. Aibu to think that this is climate change and to be scared and pissed off about it? Yes...i am a contributor to the oroblem. I know.

Of course it's linked to climate change. The Atlantic Ocean last year was incredibly warm, this means more water evaporation which means more rain. Climate change also means that weather is more stable, last month is was wetter for longer.

You can't blame unusual rainfall on blocked drains.

Poor land managament.
Poor water management.

There is not any more water than there used to be, but the land it is falling on has changed, and we have messed up the water cycle.

Where I live over the past 15 years, we can see a direct cause. We have many trees in the area, one part has removed alot of trees to build housing, now that part gets flooded quite often. The fire department comes and siphons the water off the road. We never had that problem before, when there were more trees there instead of the housing.

Things can have more than one cause.

A lot of the disruption near me has been run-off from the fields overflowing on to roads. The way the land is used (now often equestrian rather than farmed) has changed, and drainage ditches by the hedgrows (and often poor management of those) aren't maintained mean that water rapidly flows off the fields, on to roads and the silt rapidly fills the drainage and suddenly where there used to be puddles are now outright floods requiring road closures.

There is a change in weather patterns, but at a local scale, it's often the way that land is used and managed (or not) that affects the direct impact.

How many new houses are being built? Loads of new estates just in my previously small village. Then people patio their gardens. Combined with increased rainfall due to global warming its not good. It’ll get worse, a lot worse.

*@RedPony1 Today 08:48

Didnt a farmer get put in hail not long ago for dredging a river? it instantly cured the local village flooding but he still got jailed.*

He got jailed for the destruction of a river bank and for the pollution of the river. He pleaded guilty to all the offences. Google 'John Price' and 'River Lugg' and you will see the destruction.

It just moves the flooding a bit further down.

Read the science. Dredging doesn't work.

I’m also from Somerset. It’s noticeable that in some parts of the county, “once every 50 years” flooding events are now happening almost every year.

The winters are also becoming warmer. Christmas Day this year felt unnaturally
mild. Which was nice, but …

There is more rain than there used to be.

There is not any more water than there used to be,

There is.
The world is getting rainier — and no wonder. As the climate warms, the atmosphere can hold and release more moisture, meaning torrential downpours are on the rise around the planet.
“There is a crystal-clear analysis that shows, decade by decade, we have more of these extremes,” said Simon Papalexiou, a professor of civil, geological and environmental engineering at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, Canada, and the lead author of a new study showing an ominous rise in the frequency of heavy rainstorms.
The new study, published June 3 in the journal Water Resources Research, shows that heavy downpours have become more common since the middle of the last century, when global warming started to intensify.

mal in our town the council never check the drains. It took me five months, and endless chase ups, to get a drain unblocked.
There's another drain that appears to have collapsed and it was first reported over two years ago. I've personally chased it up seven times, along with the councillors, and they hope to do it this year.

I think it's a mix of climate change, blocked drains and poor planning. I'd also like to get a dig in about plastic / paved gardens while I'm here. We need to plant a bit more so rain gets soaked up.

Drainage is the responsibility of the water authorities not the government. While the government could probably legislate, or fund proper flood defences, the drains being blocked is purely about lack of maintenance by the water companies.

It's like everything else (railways etc), and is about shareholder return rather than reinvestment in infrastructure.

Yeah, the whole country has suddenly got blocked drains...of course it's climate change.
Have you seen the pictures of Worcester? Shrewsbury? Nottinghamshire? Just because your village has got new housing it doesn't cause the whole country to flood.
I live in London. I've lived in the same road for the best part of forty years and we never had any flooding locally until the last couple of years and we're about as built up as we're ever going to be. They had to evacuate parts of Hackney yesterday. Hackney! The canal burst it's banks. Never happens in Central London or it didn't used to.

I agree with this. We had floods locally, there was lots of hand wringing about a particular area which was flooded, relatively new houses -built 25 ish years ago and whilst I had huge sympathy for the householders, anyone who lived locally knew that the field they were built on was always flooded.

Thats not climate change, that’s the bloody council allowing building where it shouldn’t have. Multiply that up across the country

Where I live you used to regularly see gulley cleaning vehicles out from about September onwards. I can’t tell you the last time I saw one, yet leaves still fall from trees! It was too easy a money saving cut for councils to make

I agree with this^

Our infrastructure and housing was based on historical climate and could cope with historical rain levels etc. That capacity to cope probably has been reduced by poor maintenance of the system, and its having to cope with more extreme weather events because of climate change.

Multiple factors at play!

It can't be all down to climate change when ditches and culverts haven't been maintained properly for decades. This is due to decades of local government funding cuts from successive Westminster governments. Decades of local government cuts mean that they're cutting bone now, the fat and meat went years ago. I am close to the coast, the flooding a few miles inland is definitely worse when it's high tide and the water can't get away.

I'm absolutely not denying climate change is a real thing, but decades of lack of maintenance of all forms of drainage and watercourses of all types HAS to be a contributory factor to the situation we now find ourselves in. Also the roads would be in so much better condition of the drainage worked properly

Loads of building work on the areas outside my town which would normally act as a soak away. Run off from that during building blocked up the drains, and now you can watch the rain run over the concrete in the estate like a river, down to flood the main road. Multiple causes all acting together.

It can't all be climate change? That's half the problem / because it's complicated/ multifaceted some people want to ignore the climate change aspect all together which makes things long term much worse

the probability of severe problems goes up with climate change and the cost of mitigation shoots up

The scientists said the climate would get more extreme and so it is going that way: hotter, colder, more rain, drought.. What’s more - these patterns are happening often in the same places at different times.

Re building on flood plains.. There is something in that for sure but it doesn’t answer the fact that even areas that have had stable populations and have good run off infrastructure are suffering, e.g. Hackney in London.

Accepting its climate change means we need to reconsider our cars, turn down our wood burners, holiday less frequently abroad, stop buying cheap stuff from China and the East. It’s the hard mile once you accept climate change.

So, you live in a county famous for the wetlands, then complain about regular flooding? Baffling.

Thats not climate change, that’s the bloody council allowing building where it shouldn’t have. Multiply that up across the country

This is a bit of a tangent, but it probably isn’t the councils’ fault. Planning laws in this country are weak and these days they are in the developers’ favour.

Developers recently built a new estate on a local flood plain and the councillors felt forced to vote in favour of the development, despite serious concerns. They knew that if they voted against it, the developers would appeal, almost certainly win and the Council would be left with a sizeable legal bill which they could ill-afford.

Of course the climate is changing, it has done since the dawn of time so it's nothing new. Us humans have made a mess of the planet and now have to deal with the consequence. We build on flood planes, turn gardens into driveways and then wonder why the water has nowhere to go when it rains, not the brightest are we?

Where I am there is a huge amount of flooding - close to the record levels in 2007. I definitely think climate change is a factor but here house building also has a role. They've been aggressively building on flood plains that have been left alone for thousands of years. Each individual estate has flood mitigation measures to get them through planning but all the water that used to quite happily sit there is now running off fast into the rivers.

Rivers and lakes not dredged, drains not kept clear, houses being built by the motherload on flood plains and no natural soakaways left thus nowhere for rain water to go and people still think the weather is an issue? 😂

No it's not climate change. We live in an environment that has always had chaotic weather systems. Dry one year wet the next. Successive ice ages followed by thaws. We are a tiny island on the edge of a huge continent where every Atlantic weather system makes landfall first before reaching the mainland. Its obvious that's going to cause floods some years. We just got a wet winter this year like we got a dry summer a couple of years ago.