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I shall never forget Monday June 25, 2007. In the morning it rained. In the afternoon it rained some more, and then it rained again. The road outside my house, which has always fancied itself as a river, swiftly flooded as water poured off the fields and overwhelmed the ditches and culverts.
No big surprise. It had happened before and it will happen again. As always, it was bad news for people lower down, but no big deal for us, mere spectators on the hillside. But then came the shock. Peering out from the barn, I suddenly found water lapping over the sill. We were no longer an island. The flood wasn’t swirling around us as it usually did. It was streaming off the land in sheets and pouring through the hedge like a surge tide with a Force 10 behind it. Until it filled the living rooms of the unfortunates at the bottom of the hill, it was seldom more than a few inches deep, yet the rip could knock your legs away. My wheelie bin shot down the lane like a torpedo.
Village people have long memories, but nobody could remember anything like this. One farmer thought there might have been something similar in his grandfather’s day, in 1911 or 1912, but even that didn’t really compare. My house has stood for 200 years or more, and I’d bet that neither it nor any past occupant of the site since Neolithic smallholders first cleared the ground had ever known a flood. We were lucky. The barn stayed dry, damage to the house was minor, and the insurance company played it straight.
On the same day, Hull was hit by a calamity of Old Testament proportions. More than 8,600 homes, 1,300 businesses, the police station and 91 of the city’s 99 schools were flooded by waters that remained in some places for weeks. Less than a month later, on July 20, the Severn rose and swallowed Tewkesbury. Altogether, the wettest summer in history flooded over 55,000 properties, put 7,000 people at the mercy of the rescue services, killed 13 and cost the insurance industry £3 billion. A government-commissioned report, Learning Lessons from the 2007 Floods, known as the Pitt Review, recorded “the largest loss of essential services since World War II… Transport networks failed, a dam breach was narrowly averted and emergency facilities were put out of action”. Almost half a million people were without mains water or electricity.
It was a record-breaking catastrophe, but not an isolated one. Since the turn of the century, town after town had been hit. Shrewsbury, Boscastle, Carlisle… Wide swathes of Wales and southern England were inundated; so was North Yorkshire, which in June 2005 was swamped by a month’s worth of rain in three hours. News bulletins were a litany of homes abandoned, bridges swept away, cars lost, people drowned or airlifted to safety. Across the Atlantic, New Orleans offered a stark and hideous example of what could happen to a vulnerable community unprepared for the worst. Plans to build 160,000 new homes in Thames Gateway, along a 40-mile stretch of the estuary, caused — and continue to cause — a prolonged shaking of heads.
Actuaries and hydrologists tried to predict how many properties might be at risk. In England, the Environment Agency now puts it at one in six, which is bad enough, but professional risk consultants pitch it at one in four. London-based Risk Management Solutions (RMS) correctly calculated that the number of claims for damage in Hull would be 15 times higher than the Environment Agency predicted. What everyone did agree was that Something Must Be Done. If it wasn’t, said the Association of British Insurers, homes would become uninsurable and the housing market would collapse.
One reason for the confusion is that all floods are not the same. The most spectacular damage is done by rivers or the sea, where public flood defences are the responsibility of the Environment Agency, and where the risks are relatively easy to calculate. The problem is that two-thirds of the damage in 2007 was caused by surface water, which is the responsibility of so many fragmented and conflicting interests that it is effectively nobody’s responsibility at all. Landowners say surface water is the district council’s business; the district council says it’s the highways authority’s, and the highways authority says Get Lost. Alarmed by the crazy-horse redesign of the drainage system outside my own house (large ditch funnelling into small, perfect recipe for drowning the downhill neighbours), I was — after much telephonic buck-passing — put through to a weary individual in Norfolk County Council’s highways department whose retirement I guessed must have been imminent. People who live in flood zones, he said, are idiots who deserve what they get. “Anything else I can help you with?”
The snag with surface water is that you tend not to know you’re at risk until your sofa sails past. Surprisingly, though, many people remain oblivious of the dangers from rivers and the sea. The Environment Agency found that over 40% in vulnerable areas did not realise what they faced. Given the frequency with which climatic records are broken, and the magnifying effects of climate change, the questions could hardly be more urgent. Is there more we can do to stop floods from happening, and how can we protect ourselves when they do?
The most obvious technique, of raising houses on stilts, was already familiar in the Bronze Age. Irish and Scottish lake-dwellers were building crannogs 5,000 years ago (the well-known reconstruction in Loch Tay recreates a design from the third millennium BC). They were built for security rather than flood-proofing, but this doesn’t change the technology. In one form or another, you’ll see it in coastal and lakeside communities across the world — Borneo, Thailand, Burma, Vietnam, Laos, the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, India, Alaska, Connecticut, Norway, west Africa and much of South America. You’ll see it in English beach huts and boat houses. It takes a bit of imagination, though, to see it spreading to suburban housing estates across the West Midlands. A high-tech age is going to want high-tech solutions.
For that kind of inspiration we turn to Holland, many of whose people live at the altitude of mackerel — an entire nation of idiots, as the man in the highways department might regard them. And yet what we import from the easygoing Dutch is tulips and cheese, not water wings. The core principle of their architects is to go with the flow. Don’t fight the elements, work with them.
A recent development at Maasbommel, 60 miles from Amsterdam, typifies the mindset. The houses are built on hollow concrete foundations that will float when the Maas river floods, then settle when it subsides. Concrete piles link them to their neighbours and keep them in place.
The UK has no such tradition of bold design, though there is a consensus now that we’d better start developing one. Last year, the Royal Institute of British Architects (Riba), and the Norwich Union (as Aviva then was), ran a design competition for “Flood-proof houses for the future”. This threw up a range of ideas from the mundane to the mad. Basically there are four ways in which to protect a house against floods:
