Anyone else surprised at how unprepared we are for emergencies?

[RedTartanLass]

Talking about the flooding, cars stuck on motorway, with no police or army support.

Nobody knows what's going on, even the Media. There seems no coordination of the emergecny services.

A complete shambles!

googled and channel surfed but can't get mauch up to date info. Why was the central reservation not taken out to let cars turn around?

Highways Agency not answering phones, probably not in, well it is a Saturday!

glad we are bonkers and mad together wannabe

What on Wednesday, someone said they heard on the news on Wednesday to keep off the road. Good greif i give up!!

Of course keep off the roads as soon as you hear, and I've already posted earlier this morning warning a poster not to travel to Cornwall, her dh is insising

So you all stayed in your houses yesterday morning......

"The government have many failings, but it is not their job to combat nature."

Forget Eye-Raq President Bush, Nature is your worst enemy

Cammelia, if you're sure you don't want a lift in my boat!!

but no-one said that people shouldn't travel, what I said was that if there are warnings not to travel and people decide to do so anyway they can hardly blame the government if they get stuck on a motorway.

That's common sense, surely. if news says "don't travel" and you decide to do so, you do so in the knowledge that it is probably going to take you some time and therefore you go prepared, no?

I think the people on the m5 were not at risk of their lives..i'm glad resources are sent to those in greatest need rather than discomfort..common sense to travel with your own supplies of food and water, a blanket, torch, shovel, first aid kit, tissues, high visibility vest, rainwear etc you may be in an accident

Not someone, RTL, me. I saw the weather warnings on Ceefax (page 402 for my local weather) on Wednesday.

Luckily for me we only had a sprinkle of rain this time,we were about the only corner of the SE that missed it, although like I said I did have a mini-tornado right over my house last Sunday which caused considerable damage to houses on the hills behind me.

I'm surprised that following a week of severe flooding in many parts of the country, that having been given a severe weather warning so many people chose to ignore it.
I'm surprised to see people throwing out stuff like plastic potties because they've been 'ruined' by floodwater.
I'm not surprised sadly by people trying to find someone to blame.

apparently dp tells me he heard on radio news that the environment agency tried to deploy emergency flood defences to Evesham but couldn't get through the gridlocked traffic.

The police are working hard,my eldest son is in the force and has just worked two seventeen hour shifts.

Well I'm here in the thick of it, luckily we weren't flooded. The problem was the amount of rain. It rained hard really hard for over 24 hours. Many of the problems at the time were the roads being turned into rivers. If you look at pictures of the M50 it looks like a canal. No-one could have predicted that. We have a trickle of a brook that runs 2 fields down (luckily down) from our house. that was 15-20 metres wide.

There was soooo much water falling over such a vast area - 3 or 4 or 5 counties that the water could only rise where it fell. The problem now is that all that water arrived at the rivers and they have swelled to unimaginable proportions.

I believe in this particular instance there was nothing that anyone could have done. Nonone could stop that amount of water falling from the sky. I was one that took no notice of the warnings and ventured off to the supermarket luckily I got home at lunchtime when there was no surface water but had I been two hours later it would have been waste high, which is completely unbelieveable but it happened.

But yes your idea of taking the central reservation down was a good idea. But in the circumstances the emergency services weren't sat around doing nothing, they prioritised calls to those in life/death situations which is how it should be.

This is England. Everyone here has a god given right to do whatever they feel like whenever they feel like and the weather is a pointless annoyance that only PC climate ranters, muesli-munching Guardian readers and inbred farmers take notice of...

That seemed to be the consensus among the drivers tailgating each other in the fast lane at 75mph in the pissing rain last week. Given that attitude it's amazing anyone was prepared at all. Same goes for (shock! horror!) snow in winter...

Hey Wannabe, I'm just waiting to hear about the first lawsuit against The Almighty for breeching of human rights.

Well dh works just outside of Tewkesbury, listens to radio 4 there and back every single day - got no warnings not to travel on Friday.

As it was, they left work an hour or two early when it got obvious the weather was getting serious. He took 4.5 hours to get home rather than his usual half an hour - having to try lots of alternative routes and yes... using the M5 for some of it.

He was lucky - his boss and several others from his office left about half hour later and had to keep going back to the office as they couldn't get out, until eventually the landlord (the office is on a farm) gave them a lift to the nearest colleague's house in his 4x4 where they all kipped overnight.

Blaming those who got caught in it because they "ignored" warnings to stay off the roads makes me rather angry, tbh.

Suspecting that this thread would contain the usual: "oh this country doesn't know how to deal with weather...it wouldn't happen on the continent you know", I just thought I'd come on to say the exact same thing happens on the continent...

I used to live in Switzerland and the airport would close at the merest glimpse of a snowflake and the worst traffic jam I ever got caught in was on the motorway between Belgium and Luxembourg because there was a slight puddle.

As for weather warnings, we cancelled our camping trip to Dorset on Friday because the weather warnings were so severe. As it happens, Dorset was not really too badly affected but it really was pretty obvious that extreme events were happening.

Not quite sure how this is the government's fault.

I have to say that the although 'general public' may think that there is co-ordination between the emergency services; there isn't. They are no more co-ordinated now than they were 15 years ago despite emergency contingency plans, terror alerts and the like. More often than not they get through by the seat of their pants relying on a bit of teamwork, common sense and the bravery of individuals. The authorities couldn't organise a piss up in a brewery to be frank, too bloody busy ticking boxes.