Before the Flood

The arrival of new money, a new rivers authority and promises of infrastructure were all going to help make flooding on the Levels a distant memory. James Garrett is not so sure.....

Dear readers

Thanks for supporting Somerset Confidential®. We really need your support as a subscriber to carry out our work. Cheap journalism is easy to find. It doesn’t really cover news and it certainly doesn’t investigate/interrogate in the way that we do.

We still hold to our traditional values of:

• asking questions

• investigating

• telling truth to power

If you believe in these values too, you can help us by subscribing. If you haven’t already, you can take out a subscription here:

If you’ve already taken a free subscription, would you consider a paid one to help us do more of what we do? For 58p a week, the price of 5 Jaffa cakes, we’ll give you all these:

• 4 extra articles a month, investigative or analytical pieces.

• The chance to have your say, to comment argue and debate our articles

• full access to our back catalogue (it is getting bigger every week)

• that warm fuzzy feeling from supporting one of Somerset’s most innovative journalism projects.

We like to think of it like this. Support us – and you are supporting a better governed Somerset. You can join and support us here….

Thank you

Andrew Lee - Editor

---

Before the Flood

A decade on from catastrophic floods which devastated low-lying areas of Somerset, another wet winter is being forecast - and crucial drainage work to unblock rivers and streams has halted. James Garrett wades into the debate.

----------

A new Floods Resilience Taskforce (FRT) with the job of "turbocharging the development of flood defences and bolstering the nation’s resilience to extreme weather" has been established by the government, amid concerns that yet another wet winter is on the way.

This expert group first met on 12 September to "discuss how they will speed up and co-ordinate flooding preparation and resilience between central government, local authorities and community responders, and emergency services."

Floods Minister Emma Hardy said, "As chair of the FRT, I will work closely with our partners to ensure projects remain on track."

They will have their work cut out, we can reveal, given the UK experienced the wettest 18 months on record (to February 2024), while, at the same time, spending on flood prevention work has been reduced.

Not that last winter's severe storms, Babet and Ciarán, are anything like the last of it for the 5.5 million properties in England which the government estimates are at risk from flooding.

During the FRT meeting the Met Office confirmed that there was an increased probability of this coming winter being wetter than average.

Forecasters said that, following a wet September, the ground would be waterlogged and rivers swollen; next month is expected to be similarly wet.

following a wet September, the ground would be waterlogged

Somerset is all too familiar with extreme winter weather leading to flooding. In January 2014 a major incident was declared on the Somerset Levels, where 17,000 acres of land remained underwater a month after flooding began.

Ian Liddell-Grainger, then the MP for Bridgwater, told Parliament a huge area of Somerset was "drowning." He blamed the EA for not dredging rivers, which had caused communities to be cut off and important roads blocked.