The only way now into the heart of the village of Moorland on the Somerset Levels, the epicentre of the unprecedented battering Britain is taking from the elements, is in an amphibious vehicle or on a tractor trailer. Mark and Kate Kirby were using the tractor trailer method to take another look at their four-bedroomed semi, which had never flooded in its 150-year history, but is now waist-deep in water.
“It’s got worse,” said Mr Kirby, a wholesale fruit and veg supplier after his latest trip in. “Today it was awful, we couldn’t get through the door, it was jammed. It’s smelling, it’s stinking. It’s just awful.” The couple, who have three children aged 10 to 16, shake their heads when asked if they can imagine ever getting back. “I talk to some optimistic people and they say May, June,” said Mr Kirby. “Others are saying 12 months. It could be any time in between.”
The battle to save Moorland has been extraordinary. A week ago a few homes were underwater and most householders were confident they would be able to fight back the flood and stay put. There were valiant sandbagging efforts from Environment Agency, residents and scores of volunteers. The marines also arrived and grabbed headlines. But the waters kept rising and almost the whole village is now empty. “It’s a ghost town,” said Mr Kirby.
Follow the River Parrett a little south and west and you reach the village of Burrowbridge. Here Peter Hilling, a retired computer installer, was to be found trying to pump out ankle-deep water from his old farmhouse. “It’s rough,” he said. “The water was higher. We’ve got four pumps going and we’ve got it down to a couple of inches inside. The idea is to hold it there and then hopefully the water outside will go down. But it’s still coming up outside now an inch every day. We’ve lived here since ‘96. This has never flooded before. This is the first time it’s ever got anywhere near the house.”
Monsoon winter
The stormy assault mounted by the extreme weather since December is most relentless the nation has ever recorded, with one extreme attack has smashing in after another. The opening salvo - a huge East coast storm surge - was the most severe since at least 1953; the Christmas deluge sank Surrey and the Levels; the January monsoon was the greatest since at least 1766; ferocious, incessant winds topping 100mph are set to blow away decades-old records.
Tempestuous politics
The nine-week onslaught has also whipped up a political storm, as public anger has risen as inexorably as the filthy waters in thousands of homes. When Prime Minister David Cameron finally confronted the tempest face-on, he channeled a Churchillian blitz spirit: “It will be a long haul and it will require a stepped up national effort, with the whole country pulling together. Amidst all of this, as is so often the case, in the toughest of times we are seeing the best of Britain.” In testament to the scale of the political crisis, on Tuesday Cameron deployed the last-resort weapon - a blank cheque: “Money is no object in this relief effort.”
In fact, his predecessor’s most famous speech serves a striking summary of the current battle of Britain: “We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches ... we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills.” The coast has crumbled as giant swells sweep in, fields have become lakes, streets turned to torrents and soaked hills have seen the reappearance of rivers not seen for 50 years. The boots of thousands of troops have now hit the streets, although at Wraysbury in Berkshire they arrived on Tuesday without the appropriate footwear.
The UK’s climate, like the British themselves, has long been seen as mild and reserved. The islands’ location on the frontline between land and ocean gives famously changeable weather, but like the beer, is generally tepid. However the frontline turned hostile this winter: “It’s a battleground” said Mark McCarthy, at the Met Office. “The UK is at the meeting point big of different air masses, between the continent, the Atlantic and to the North, the pole.” Underneath, a densely populated nation is struggling to cope.
“We have a wet and volatile climate, 11,073 miles of coastline and little geographical room to manoeuvre on our small island,” said Professor Paul Bates, a hydrologist the University of Bristol.
The saga has fed the national obsession with the weather. Somerset was flooded for about five weeks before the issue began to rise up the media and political agenda, but in the past week there has been saturation coverage. Images of submerged properties have proved irresistible. But while about 5,000 households are enduring flooding and tens of thousands power cuts, the gravest impacts have been mercifully modest: perhaps one or two fatalities have been reported. On Wednesday, a man in his 70s was electrocuted while attempting to move a tree that brought down power cables near Chippenham, Wiltshire. Flood defences, where they have existed, such as the famous Thames Barrier, have worked.
The rain blame
If the weather has turned intemperate, so has the argument about who is to blame. Somerset MP Ian Liddell Grainger labelled the bosses of the Environment Agency, which delivers the nation’s flood defences, “bush hookers” and its chairman a “git”. Sniping between cabinet ministers descended into accusations of “grandstanding” and being “stupid“. Cameron stamped out the blame game just as the flood crisis reached the nation’s most famous river, the Thames, whose floodplain snakes through the prosperous south-east, a Conservative heartland.
“I think they understand now how serious it is,” said Prof Colin Thorne, a flood expert at the University of Nottingham. “I mean holy smoke - it’s right next to Eton College!” he said, referring to the prime ministers exclusive school.
The Environment Agency - whose budget has been slashed and is losing 25% of its staff, including frontline personnel - has been scapegoated. Its job is to help protect the UK from flooding. But John Curtin, the EA’s head of incident management, has been too busy responding to the emergency to be deflected from his task. “It’s been wave after wave since mid-December. We have been working 24/7 for nine weeks now. It has been intense and I don’t think this is over: there will be a sting in the tail with more storms to come.”
Curtin emphasises the immediate need to protect lives and livelihoods and relieve misery and that existing defences have protected over a million homes this winter. The vast floods of 2007 submerged 55,000 homes, ten times the total so far this winter: “But this does feel different, as other big floods before subsided much more quickly,” he said. When the waters finally drain away, he said, the opportunity will be there to get people to face the increasing risk of flooding being brought by global warming. But it will be challenging, he added: “People say I don’t want a flood warning - I want a flood defence.”
In many parts of the country, the Environment Agency did good preventative work - creating an artificial lake north of Winchester, the burial place of King Canute, to limit flooding in the historic city. But the public criticism of the agency, and politicians, and even other emergency services has at times been acute in flood hit areas. Only Prince Charles, visiting Somerset last week, has been universally well received.
Floods and warnings, week by week
Dam it?
The argument about how better to face flooding has raged. Centuries of subjugating nature by draining marshes, felling forests and turning meandering rivers into ramrod-straight concrete tubes appears to be reaching its limit, as the population rises and the climate worsens. Let’s go back to nature, plug up the drains and slow down the rivers, argue many experts. Bring back beavers and their dams, say a few.
But making space for water, as the experts call it, takes time, not a commodity in great supply in an emergency. It also inevitably means the controlled flooding of fields. The EA’s embattled boss, Lord Smith, ignited the ire of farmers by suggesting hard choices needed to be made: “front rooms or farmland?“
Of all the muck flung in the flood crisis, the stickiest has been accusations that the dredging of rivers has been abandoned. Digging the dirt out of rivers has worked for centuries, locals on the Levels roar: something must be done now. But, even at the Somerset Drainage Board Consortium, the expert view that times have changed forever and dredging is no longer the answer has sunk in. “There is a fixation locally on dredging as a solution, when everybody professionally agrees it probably isn’t,” said Nick Stevens, SDBC chief executive. He said most homes in the Levels, many below sea level, would once have been occupied by farm workers who expected flooding: “But these have changed over the years into very nice country homes that people want to protect.”
The hardest of the choices being touted is the simplest: retreat. In a century’s time, it was possible that the Levels had been abandoned to the rising ocean, Stevens acknowledged. The SDBC’s new plan includes “promoting and assisting the relocation of very flood vulnerable households out of the floodplain.” But, Stevens added: “The transition to something like that will be hugely painful and expensive.”
Dirty old river
If the notion of an Englishman’s castle as his home is being challenged on the Levels, where scores of properties flooded, the bursting of the Thames from its banks a few hundred yards from the royal castle of Windsor has raised the issue to a new height. The flood plain of the great river is home to many thousands of the most expensive properties in the land and the outlook is wet.
“What we are currently seeing is the Thames exercising its natural sovereignty over its floodplain,” said Terry Marsh, a hydrologist at the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology at Wallingford. “It is the highest sustained flow since 1883. I was born in 1947 these are the wettest nine weeks I have lived through: we are in the extreme range of historical variability.” Levels will remain high for weeks.
Marsh argues that the mobility of modern society means that folk knowledge of flooding in villages and towns is quickly lost. He points to the raised pavements in the high street of Hambledon in Sussex, as reminder that in the 19th century the main street doubled as a drain. The Thames’s rise is an awful but salient reminder, he said.
Adaptation will be key, Marsh said: “You see new flats on the Thames at Reading where the ground floor is entirely devoted the parking so the river can just flow through.” Many in the flood management world are urging people to take greater measures to protect their domestic castles at times of peril, from toilet bungs and air brick covers to more drastic measures, such as building on stilts for those reluctant to forgo their river view.
The face of the waters
From the homestead, to the fields to the whole world, the battle of humanity versus nature has been waged since God ordered Adam and Eve to subdue the Earth. According to social scientist, Prof Patrick Devine-Wright at the University of Exeter, the tempests currently testing Britain are putting deep seated values on trial: can man beat nature or not? “One of the things that defines this debate is the idea we can dominate nature, but the events of the last couple of months has shattered that,” he said. The political crisis is particularly acute for similar reasons, he said: “Politicians find it hard to admit they can’t control events - it makes them seem weak.”
Research after flooding in 2010 and 2012 shows that being confronted by flooding in your own home, changes people’s attitudes to the risks posed by extreme weather. “People who had been flooded were significantly more worried about climate change,” said Catherine Butler, who did the work while at Cardiff University.
The British public is evenly split on the role of climate change in the current floods, but scientists have made clear that intensifying downpours are most likely as the world warms, and that flooding is the most damaging impact of changing climate in the UK. Flooding that hit southern England as far back as 2000 is already known to have been made twice as likely by climate change.
As the drenched weeks have passed, attention has grown on the Conservative party’s alleged U-turn on the environment since gaining power, intensified by the apparent climate change scepticism of the environment secretary Owen Paterson. On his watch, the funding for adapting to climate change - including as fortifying railways like the one smashed into the sea in Devon - has plummeted by 40%.
The government’s own official advisers, the Committee on Climate Change (CCC) has warned that austerity cuts to annual flood risk management spending has left a £500m hole in the defences, and will result in £3bn of damage in the longer term. “Sometimes it takes a crisis like this to wake people up,” noted a rueful Lord John Krebs, who led the CCC’s work in this area.
Perhaps, as the storm fronts continue to roll in, Cameron may be reflecting on the whispered aside ascribed to Churchill as the House of Commons boomed its approval of his beaches speech: “And we’ll fight them with the butt ends of broken beer bottles because that’s bloody well all we’ve got!”
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