‘To live a normal life again, it’s a dream come true’: UK’s first climate evacuees can cast off their homes and trauma
Forty-odd residents of Clydach Terrace in Ynysybwl, south Wales, relieved by council buyout after years in fear of fast flooding...
Of the 18 houses on the street, only 6a and 6b – newer builds set back from the road, and up a slope – will remain. One woman living there said she would not be moving, but her son, a little further down the road, will be...
It took some chutzpah to work the notion of 'climate evacuees' into the headline of a story which could have been a more analytical example of the various natural, self-imposed and civil engineering challenges of flood defence.
Forty-odd residents of Clydach Terrace in Ynysybwl, south Wales, relieved by council buyout after years in fear of fast flooding...
Of the 18 houses on the street, only 6a and 6b – newer builds set back from the road, and up a slope – will remain. One woman living there said she would not be moving, but her son, a little further down the road, will be...
It took some chutzpah to work the notion of 'climate evacuees' into the headline of a story which could have been a more analytical example of the various natural, self-imposed and civil engineering challenges of flood defence.
The Grauniad manages it but -
In some ways, the street is uniquely unlucky. The classic mining community row of early 20th-century stone houses was built on a natural floodplain, and its narrowness means there is no room for flood waters to dissipate. Crucially, the terrace is in a basin, meaning that a rise of just a centimetre over the retaining wall can almost instantly turn into 2 metres of water, engulfing nearby houses within minutes.
When I was a boy there would be a flood every now and again when there were unusually high tides. It probably helped if the river was full too and there was a sou'wester blowing. What struck me was that the flood level was always such that the cottages in our lane were just above it. And the buildings around the harbour - rather fine Victorian warehouses mainly - always coped because their working platforms were above the flood level even if the bays for the lorries would fill up.
ReplyDeleteThey knew a thing or two, the Victorians. When did the nation become so thoroughly stupid?
dearieme - reminds me of photos of Tewkesbury Abbey sitting there above the flood waters. I remember in the seventies there were water industry criticisms of local councils giving planning permission for houses to be built on flood plains.
ReplyDeleteA trip along the Severn Valley shows all the houses are all built well back and above the valley floor.
ReplyDeleteYnys = island (or water meadow) ; the clue’s in the name
ReplyDeleteAs you say, it takes some chutzpah to attribute it to climate change when the water was there long before the village (see also news stories saying the same of flooding in the Somerset Levels and the River Ouse ‘bursting its banks’ in York - ie overtopping a medieval wharf built out into the river to allow boats with a deeper draught to dock).
A 'narrow flood plain' is self-contradictory isn't it?
ReplyDeleteAs your posts so often do, this one rang a bell; just checked and, sure enough, there has been much recent online wailing and gnashing of teeth over the impact of climate change on an area of riverside housing in the town where I grew up.
ReplyDeleteThe town perches high above a major river and a noted feature is the river bank below the original walls, once the site of the town’s tanneries and washing and drying areas for laundry. As primary school children, we were taken there and shown the plaques high up on the wall which, like those on farm buildings across the river, record the levels of successive historic floods.
After extensive drainage work upstream in the 19th century (the then Duke wanted to increase his farmland holdings), houses were built nearby on land well below the level of these plaques. The houses remained dry for over a century until environmental lobbying led to the effective reversal of this work in order to return the river and its surroundings to their ‘natural’ state; with a horrible inevitability, the same organisations which argued for the reversal are now at the forefront of those citing these recently-flooded properties as evidence of climate change.
John - yes, it's strange how they worked it out without consultants and planning authorities isn't it?
ReplyDeleteMacheath - interesting, where possible, returning rivers to their ‘natural’ state has been official policy for a long time. Of course it effectively means slowing down river flows to allow more meandering and more water meadows.
As the 19th century Duke knew, a river in its natural state may not drain the land as effectively as it could after drainage work designed to increase the flow of water in the river. This of course leads to more scouring which environmentalists don't like, but we may assume they don't live on flood plains.
decnine - it is isn't it? Maybe a case of a journalist not knowing what else to put. It could have been compared to a dam spillway perhaps.
"to return the river and its surroundings to their ‘natural’ state" The idea that there is a 'natural' state is incoherent. Nature hasn't been natural since hominids learnt the art of exploiting fire.
ReplyDeletedearieme - I sometimes wonder if that's the unspoken background fantasy, to aim for a world as it was before hominids learnt to use fire.
ReplyDelete