nunoncastors

Tedious news story.

I’ve said it before; I’ll say it again, if you live by a stream, brook, burn, river, canal, rivulet, spring, lake or indeed any other type of watercourse, you should expect flooding at some point.

I bring this up because, yet again, the news is awash with ‘flooding misery’ and sound bites from people bemoaning the fact that the government isn’t doing anything about it. Quite what they expect, I don’t know. Presumably they’d like their house moving to the top of a hill or massive flood defences building so it becomes a problem for people further downstream rather than themselves. Maybe they’d like an ark building or a biblical prophet to part the waters around their property next to a bloody river.

Anyone’d think we’d only just arrived on this planet and water was a new concept we were still struggling with. I’ve never seen such a group of gawking morons. Ok, so your house is underwater, that’s sad. But here’s a newsflash; you live next to a river, an entity renowned for being comprised of water. When it rains, that river collects lots of water from miles around and sometimes, astonishingly, does what full rivers do and overflows. This is not something new. Far from it in fact, it’s something that’s been happening since before human beings evolved from the primordial ooze, since before we stopped actually breathing water. Now I could be wrong, but I think it’s the reason why until recently no one built their houses on those big flat expanses known as ‘flood plains’ is because, guess what, they fucking flood!

Even if you’re not living on a flood plain, even if your property has never flooded before, if you live near water there’s a chance it’ll one day rise up and ruin your carpet. It’s done it before, it’ll do it again, don’t be so dense.

There are of course, exceptions to this tirade, people for whom I feel genuinely sorry. These are the poor buggers who genuinely have never had a problem with flooding before and live in locations that, previously, were blissfully unaffected. So, why do they have a problem now?

Well, it’s all down to incompetence and greed isn’t it? Developers pay whomever it is they need to pay to be allowed to build houses in stupid locations and, in doing so, change the nature of the ground flow, maybe they build some flood defences while they’re at it. But all that water has to go somewhere, right? Previously it spread out over the flats and marshes but now it can’t, so it’s channelled along its usual course and funnelled through flood defences, past the cities and towns, and back out into the countryside where there aren’t any because, well, they’ve never had a problem with flooding before.

Only, oh no, the river’s a lot higher than it usually is because of all the excess water it’s still carrying. Guess what happens next.

You’d think people would realise that, in changing the nature of a river and its surrounds, there’s going to be knock-on effects downstream. It’s hardly a difficult concept is it?