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As our summers get hotter and winters get wetter, Broadstairs writer and KentOnline columnist Melissa Todd says no one is building smartly, planning wisely or putting enough money aside…
Britain is getting wetter. It rained and it rained and it rained, Piglet said, back in 1926: Heaven knows what he’d make of our current soggy state. The 18 months to February 2024 were the wettest since continuous records began in 1836. We are suffering more, and much more devastating, floods. We’re being told to prepare for them, although water is a terrifyingly unstoppable force, liable to laugh at our feeble efforts to contain it.
The ground is saturated, rivers are brimming, there’s nowhere for it to go. Meanwhile we gaily concrete over our farmland, as if one in four homes weren’t already in danger of flooding. Thanet, where I live, has a particular talent for this, but it’s happening all over Kent, and elsewhere. Still, beyond Westwood Cross, down the New Haine Road, new developments seem to shoot skywards daily, without the necessary infrastructure, doctors, schools, roads, to support them, and with barely the charm of juvenile detention centres. With every inch covered in buildings, roads and concrete, rivers have nowhere to go when they rise but into people’s homes. Without fields to absorb the rain it must rise on the roads and spill over doorsteps.
Britain spends around £1 billion a year on flood defences. That sounds like a lot, but it’s just 1/8th of a penny from each pound the government goes through. It isn’t enough, but increasing it means taking money from somewhere else. Schools? Pensions? The roads and railways? The NHS? Good luck with that. And in any case, engineering alone can’t fix our watery woes. Better drainage and flood walls will buy time but won’t solve the problem. We need to rethink where we build. We need to restore woodland and peatland alongside rivers. We need long-term commitments and major investment, neither of which are forthcoming.
It’s easy to blame poor urban planning for flooding, so we definitely should. But the terrifying truth, Piglet, is the problem is bigger than that. Britain is not the only country seeing more and scarier storms. As we overheat our planet by burning fossil fuels, the oceans evaporate faster. And since what goes up will eventually come down, it rains and rains and rains.
As it did in Spain last October, killing 224 people. Or as it did in California almost exactly 12 months ago. Los Angeles got half a year’s rainfall in a single afternoon. Mudslides washed away movie stars’ homes. But then the rain stopped. For nine months now, not a drop has fallen, because the same global warming that can make the Pacific Ocean spew out rainstorms as scary as Noah’s can also bottle up the wet winds—and none of our fancy climate models can tell us which we’re about to get. The result: after two wet winters that filled the hills around the City of Angels with carpets of grass, flowers and shrubs, one dry one has turned them to tinder. And now it is on fire. Paradise has become Hell.
Whipped by winds reaching 150 kilometres an hour, the flames overwhelmed firefighters. 150 square kilometres have burned, leaping from forest into the city itself. “The houses become the fuel,” says the fire department’s spokesman. “It’s Armageddon.”
At least 12,300 buildings have burned. 80,000 people have fled. 27 have been killed. And now California must reckon with the costs. Insurance companies had already largely abandoned the state, unable to charge enough to cover their exposure as climate change accelerates. The state has stepped in with its own insurance scheme, backed by a massive war chest of £330 million; but even the lowest estimate of losses is 100 times higher. That’s £33 billion. With a b. From just one fire.
Back to Kent, far in every sense from California, but that’s kinda the point. What happens 5,000 miles away is inextricably intertwined with our own soggy winter. Everyone’s summers are getting hotter, drier and longer. Everyone’s storms are getting fiercer. No one has built smartly, planned wisely or put enough money aside. Scientists have been saying this for a generation, but some of the world’s most powerful people still refuse to listen.