Carry on Flooding!

With much current debate on climate change, my book (The Rise and Fall of the Jubilee River) has now developed into a film script.  With the not very original working title of ‘Carry on Flooding’ this entirely fictitious but educational scenario will portray the justification, design, construction, operation and associated consequences of a multi-million pound flood alleviation scheme that proved to be sub-standard and resulted in a significant out-of-court financial settlement.  Of course any similarities with people or events will be entirely coincidental, but more importantly due to the limited budget I am considering taking the role of appearing not only as myself, but also in different disguises as eleven other key characters in the plot.

The unique style of the screenplay will employ a veneer of comedy to mask the unbelievable, indeed outrageous behaviour of individuals in authority whose farcical conduct lies somewhere between incompetent and negligent.  The plot will reveal how the conventional approach to engineered flood risk reduction (i.e. working from downstream up) was apparently abandoned and will demonstrate how cost/benefit analysis was used to justify a ‘bit-in-the-middle’ project that went badly wrong from conception.

In particular, the storyline will illustrate how a wealthy town can with impunity have floodwater diverted into the defenceless downstream villages, and then have the audacity to dispatch lorry loads of sandbags after the event.  Then while the Minister refuses to hold a Public Inquiry, the chairman of the local flood defence committee receives an award for services to flood defence in the New Years Honours List, prior to elevation within the professional institution.

I intend to focus on the human inability of both civil servants and elected representatives to accept the truth, to apologise for their shortcomings (or even show contrition), or to learn from their mistakes.  I will show that having a vested interest in keeping their jobs, politicians from the top down and people paid with public money (particularly the egg-spurts) have engaged in an orchestrated cover-up to protect their own backsides.

Furthermore I will demonstrate that spin and obfuscation has a limited life, and indeed show the truth of the motto ‘you can’t fool all the people all of the time’.  There will of course be reference to severe budget cuts due entirely to bird flu and a farm subsidy payment fiasco and finally the film will consider whether failure to maintain watercourses leads to increased risk of flooding, affecting property values and resulting in increased building and insurance costs to the home owner.

Ewan Larcombe

14 December 2006