FloodsU.K. bolsters flood defenses
In 1953, more than 300 people died in the United Kingdom alone when heavy storms swept a high spring tide over sea defenses and across coastal towns in north-east England and Scotland. Today floods still make headlines but our ability to limit their effects has come a long way. Flooding costs the United Kingdom £2.2 billion a year in defenses and repairs, and annual spending must keep growing just to maintain present defenses. That is a massive investment, but history — and recent history at that — shows that the risk of flooding should not be underestimated.
In 1953, more than 300 people died in the United Kingdom alone when heavy storms swept a high spring tide over sea defenses and across coastal towns in north-east England and Scotland. Today floods still make headlines but our ability to limit their effects has come a long way. Adele Walker explains why.
One in six properties in England is at risk of flooding — maybe yours is one of them. Apart from the human misery these events cause, flooding costs the United Kingdom £2.2 billion a year in defenses and repairs, and annual spending must keep growing just to maintain present defenses. That is a massive investment, but history — and recent history at that — shows us that the risk of flooding should not be underestimated.
Extreme weather and flood events are becoming ever-more frequent and severe. Winter 2013’s exceptional stormy weather set new records or near-records for pretty much every environmental factor that can influence floods: wind speed, wave energy, coastal storm surges, rainfall, groundwater levels and river flows. The Thames Barrier was closed 28 times — a fifth of all closures since it opened in 1982.
But even though winter 2013 saw the U.K.’s highest storm surge since the 1953 disaster, only around 6,000 properties were flooded — a tragedy for those affected, but only a fraction of the homes and businesses wrecked in far less severe flooding a few years before. Something important has changed - and it’s not just the weather.
The big picture
Finding a way to live with floods in the long term means understanding all the factors that combine to cause them. This is where the breadth of NERC’s expertise and scientific partnerships has made such a difference. Because we invest in research across environmental science disciplines, we can combine knowledge of all the contributing factors and how they interact — understanding and monitoring changes in sea level and tides, how rivers and groundwater behave under different conditions, and how the way we manage our land, waterways and coastlines affects those natural variables.
Then there’s the effect of our changing weather and climate. Over the last twenty years scientists have learned that this is more complex than we thought, and we need to include factors such as solar radiation, melting ice caps and the El Niño effect. Scientists call these teleconnections — links between meteorological and other environmental phenomena which happen a long distance apart — a bit
