Forget Climate Excuses: Environment Agency Ignored Flood Warnings For Years–The Times
By Paul Homewood
GWPF carry this news from The Times:
As flooding spread across the country yesterday, the Association of Drainage Authorities said that warnings had been issued each year since 2007 at its annual conference, attended by Environment Agency staff.
The warnings were made by the association’s members in South Yorkshire, including John Duckitt, a farmer and elected commissioner of the drainage board that covers Fishlake near Doncaster, where parts of the village are still submerged more than a week after flooding began.
Speaking from his home yards from the Don, Mr Duckitt, 83, said that his concerns fell on “deaf ears”. He claimed that the agency “chooses to do as little as possible” and had allowed trees and plants to grow on the side of the river narrowing the channel after “ignoring local knowledge”.
“They knew about the problem and chose to ignore it,” he said. “This made the floods worse. Fair enough this flood was unprecedented but the Environment Agency, through lack of maintenance on the river, protracted the flood. It didn’t get away fast enough and did more damage.”
Full story (£)
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
Reading the local drainage board strategies for the catchments affected.
Basically they gave up on Fishlake (just too hard and expensive) some time ago. Nobody enacted any solutions for the discontinued coal mines who used to be a responsible for a large part of the catchment hydrology., The Coal Authority were not given adequate resources to do anything.
It is interesting to look at the 1947 ordnance survey map and compare to the latest map and see how much things have changed in relatively such a short time. My observation is flood defences have not been upgraded to suit the risk to increasing development.
Things on the ground have changed but the weather stays much the same. After all its Yorkshire!
I regularly go for a drive in the country, and without fail observe ditches, streams & even quite sizeable rivers obstructed by fallen branches, weeds and other debris. It didn’t used to be like this – when farmers and landowners maintained them. But now they can’t (or won’t take the risk) due to the EA imposing regulations regarding disposal of the dredged material…
Aye, even if you want to sort a blocked damaged Road Culvert, you need permission to PUMP the water from one side of the road to the other whilst you’re doing the remediation. (At least that’s what happens locally) A 5-minute job ( day job really ) is put off forever as a consequence – unless the Public pays for it (The Council ).
Reblogged this on Climate- Science.press.
The EA is unfit for purpose and needs investigation over its failure to dredge waterways that pose a risk of flooding. I would also like to share this link with you. https://www.spectator.com.au/author/howard-thomas-bradyexample-com/
The EA have a perfect excuse for not conducting river dredging. EU policy forbids it and threatens that those who do have to remove “the spoil from their operations as waste”
How come other EU member states do manage to avoid problems like those encountered by the UK? Which is not say they don’t have floods because they do. Currently France has 11 departments under Orange Alert for extreme weather – Wind and rain, and many departments have gone from drought to rivers in flood in the last couple of months.
Weren’t the rivers in the Somerset Levels dredged after their floods when it was discovered that it was OK to dredge after all. Bureaucrats in the UK apply rules with a rod of iron, in France they require a couple of trees worth of paper work.
Don’t they say that IF you want to dole out the Punishment, you have to take the Responsibility that goes with the power? As I understand it, the EPA ppl like to lay down the riot act to folk. Let them nowface the music when they’ve done wrong
Even the name The Environment Agency makes my lips curl into a sneer. It sounds like an advert. “Are you useless but keen of self-congratulation and virtue-signalling? Come and work for us.”
Can individual employees of the EA be charged with one of the range of offences in public office?
The apparatchiks, and jobs for gorgeous gals – the trustafarian elite, at the EA, are,
indoctrinatedtrained in UK university in global warming and obeisant, fully committed to the eu and thus enactment all of it’s luverly back to nature diktat, save the riverine creepy crawlies and pond life they are so loyal.Flooding, practicalities, pragmatic river basin management, dredging (perish the very thought), joined up thinking and planning for maximum, prolonged spate and erm they don’t do that. The threat, they are not trained to acknowledge it – coz it’s nature’s way and anyway blame it on the bogey monster – man made climate change.
£1 billion a year – down the spout, so to speak, that’s the benefits of cultural Marxism,it makes for, a hopelessly out of touch, ill trained bureaucracy, beyond our control and in alignment to a foreign diktat and beholden all to the unicorns of green.
Vote tory or liebor, the EA will float on.
In April 2014 this letter appeared in the Daily Telegraph from the former head of the EA.
SIR – After starvation in the Second World War, self sufficiency at nearly any price became the priority. Soon food mountains allowed politicians to cut expenditure on agricultural research and flood defence.
At Easter 1998, 142 constituencies in England and Wales were flooded. The Environment Agency, of which I was the first chairman, pressed the government, supported by the National Audit Office, to increase expenditure by £100 million a year, which it failed to do. I retired in December 1999, and John Prescott appointed Barbara Young from the RSPB as chief executive. It came as no surprise when, to the relief of the Treasury, she set common sense on its head, called for pumping stations to be blown up and cut maintenance by putting environment first and food and villages second.
However, the long-term blame lies not with Lady Young but with 30 years of governments believing that there are no votes to be lost in flooding the countryside. Lord Smith seems to agree. I doubt January 2014 will change that – it will now all be the fault of climate change.
Lord De Ramsey
By coincidence if you turned to The Times letters page on the day of this article
Nov 16th Lord Donoughue Ex minister of farming
wrote of how in 2,000 EA official bragged of rewilding plans and stopping pumping etc.
This is the Drainage Board responsible for the catchments. It is not just the EA lots of others are involved as well. A lot of the area lies at or below 0m AOD which means it needs pumping and draining to stay afloat.
https://www.shiregroup-idbs.gov.uk/about-us/
Though, in theory, the formation of the EA was to make local drainage boards come under a national head – a Blairite scheme.
Worse, of course, were EU directives which labelled the dredgings from ditches and water courses as ‘toxic’ waste, costing a small fortune to have ‘safely’ disposed of.
The great thing about climate change is that it makes government a lot easier when you have a universal boogeyman to blame for your failures.
https://tambonthongchai.com/2019/11/12/climate-change-wildfires/
Paul,
This is the preliminary analysis for the 2019 Yorkshire etc flooding from CEH, they seem to say the records don’t show a trend but really surprisingly climate model attribution studies will show it was all down to AGW.
https://www.ceh.ac.uk/news-and-media/blogs/severity-of-november-2019-floods-uk-preliminary-analysis?utm_source=cehsocial&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=nov19floods
Terry Marsh has retired so the younger breed takeover. I will now go back to sleep! as all hope is lost, they have to find a trend so they will. The model will prove the model.
Climate Change and the EU make great scapegoats for incompetence. Next year there’s only one goto excuse.