Flooding and a nightmare journey from London

Yesterday I had to make my way back from a national Green party councillors conference in London (ironically one we had been discussing floods at!). I spent 7 hours, 5 trains and 3 buses getting back and on several occasions along the route (in Reading and Bristol) was told I would need to stay the night in a local B&B.

Photos: Paddington Station when it reopened and below tube stations on Friday.

I've enclosed a couple of photos from the tube journey the previous day that was equally terrible: 15 Tube stations and 3 tube lines closed (all seemed to be the ones I needed to go to or travel through). Those tubes and trains that did run were unbearable full and stations on occasions became dangerously overcrowded. Some of my fellow travellers had experienced much worse journeys like one man who spent 26 hours trying to travel from London to Cheltenham. He had had to sleep in Paddington station that closed on Friday - and also saw shops flooded.

Here in Stroud by all accounts there were also many roads closed and homes flooded - the cost of storms in the last 3 weeks have been put at £15Bn so far. Gloucester Fire Service attended 1,800 incidents in 24 hours (nearly 25% of their normal annual incident rate!).

The local press asked yesterday for a comment - in my haste I said the stuff below - clearly there is lots more I could have said - let's hope these floods really wake people up - maybe planning will even listen to me more on Sustainable Urban Drainage Systems which I have been pushing for months and months!!

Comment to press:

"Many people have faced horrendous journeys and worse still seen their homes and businesses flooded. The message of these rains could not be clearer - decisive, effective action to reduce climate change is needed now along with action to prepare properly for flooding. While the other parties want to carry on building roads and subsiding more and more air travel, the Greens are the only party that will set tough targets to reduce climate pollution year after year.

Photo: mild flooding at Ebley a few weeks ago - this time the flooding was much more serious: bypass closed and all fields underwater

"Our government has been a leader in rhetoric on climate change, but an extraordinary failure in terms of policy. Extremes of climate are only set to get worse and will increasingly severely damage economies. We know what we have to do. We need proper plans to reduce flooding and deep cuts in our emissions: a managed mass withdrawal from fossil fuels, no less. This is nothing short of a war, but instead of tanks we need clean energy. Sweden for example has a plan to get out of oil within 15 years. It is possible but we must have leadership from our government."

I should note that extreme events have always occurred but this should be a warning re climate change as all the scientists say we can expect more of these extreme events.

The other lesson here is that a large number of the households affected are relatively new build in flood plains. Local councillors would appear in some areas to have been putting the profits of developers before the safety of house buyers? Is it fair now that we should be subsidising out of the public purse repairs to such homes - ie effectively allowing developers to keep their profits and take absolutely no responsibility for wrongly siting their buildings? Then again if the Government had put in place proper legislation that Greens have been requesting for years re restrictions of new build on flood plains then we wouldn't be in such a mess.

See also the last post re flooding of Ruscombe Brook at Puckshole.