The Reason Why Floods Are So Bad–And It’s Not Climate Change!
By Paul Homewood
h/t Ian Magness
A remarkably astute analysis of why floods these days are so bad, written by people who understand their river systems.
But it is astonishing that they too have fallen for the climate change nonsense:
In the past fortnight, storms Dudley, Eunice and Franklin brought the first major flooding of the winter across the UK, including the Wye and Usk valleys.
While three named storms arriving within a week of each other is unusual, what is most peculiar and alarming about these is that they have created near record flooding from nowhere near record rainfall. In fact, the amount of rain that fell over the course of last week was not out of the ordinary.
Yet here we are faced with the kind of flood events we previously expected only once every 20 years.
It isn’t just the Wye and Usk either. In the upper Severn catchment the Afon Vrynwy was at the highest level for 53 years after a rainfall event that would be expected once every year. Meanwhile, the floods on the main stem of the Severn have in places been excess of those in 2000, which at the time were considered once-in-a-lifetime episodes.
"What is very worrying about storms Dudley, Eunice and Franklin is that they caused extraordinary flooding from fairly ordinary amounts of rain"
This past two weeks have shown all too clearly what happens when increasingly intensive rain falls on river catchments that are becoming less and less able to deal with it. And if the latest floods result from a once a year rainfall event, what will happen when we receive a one in twenty or one in fifty year event? This will happen sooner or later and the results will be unimaginable. In the past year we have seen what intensive rainfall can do in parts of Germany and Italy, which received 100-150mm in a day and 900mm in a day (181mm in an hour) respectively.
The Environment Agency’s Wye gauge from Hereford. Between 1945 and 2000, a level over 5 metres was recorded seven times. The Wye has exceeded that level three times in the past 13 months.
Climate change is, of course, the reason for more intensive rainfall. But at the same time, nearly everything that has been done to our river catchments in the past few decades has reduced their ability to store water, precisely at a time when we needed the exact opposite. An alarming proportion of the catchments’ soils are puddled, compacted and degraded (i.e. their organic matter levels have been much reduced which directly influences water holding capacity) through increasingly intensive agricultural practices.
Other areas of land have been managed in a way that purposely gets rid of water as fast as possible – from forestry drains in the headwaters to land drainage systems further downstream. One of the tragic ironies is that Government policies and grant schemes have encouraged these practices. The taxes of those now so badly affected by flooding have being spent on getting the water out of the catchment as fast as possible.
Puddling of the ground drastically reduces the ability of water to penetrate the soil, leading to more of it running straight off into a nearby river or stream
Reversing or preventing climate change from worsening would help this issue of course, but that will take time. It needs a coordinated worldwide effort which, if last November’s COP26 Conference is anything to go by, we are still some way from achieving (the latest UN report states our current changes are irreversible anyway). To solve this problem for the sake of the rivers, for farmers and society at large we need to look at ways of enabling the landscape to hold and delay water as it once did.
This isn’t some environmentalist pipe dream. Healthy soils can hold huge amounts of water. Around 80% of the Usk’s short and medium term rainfall storage is in the soil. We know that healthy soils containing high levels of organic matter can absorb 50-100mm of rain a day, to be released via springs and drains some hours or days later.
Areas of woodland can absorb even more. The Pontbren Project in Powys has shown that the strategic planting of tree shelter belts across upland slopes can reduce surface run-off by allowing it to soak more quickly into the soil. Their investigations have discovered that in some woodland areas, water soaked into the soil 60 times quicker than in nearby grassland pastures.
"Everyone and everything benefits from healthier soils that absorb more water – farmers, local residents and river ecology. There are no losers."
There are other measures that can be taken to reduce the volume and speed of water washing off the landscape too:
- Avoiding fields with high risk topography and connectivity to watercourses for high risk crops
- Planting hedges across slopes
- Moving gate ways and directing vehicle movements away from overland flow lines
- Maintaining cover on arable fields over winter, for example under-sowing maize (photo right)
- Adopting grazing techniques that enable rest and recovery periods for soils, rather than set stocking
- Reducing cultivations and working to rebuild depleted organic matter and repair poor structure
- Planting areas where overland flow occurs to become rough, tussocky grass, scrub or trees.
It must be emphasised, however, that all these measures have to be undertaken in the right part of the catchment. Delaying water from entering a river at the bottom of its catchment without doing the same at top can actually increase flood risk in the lower reaches.
Moving gate ways and directing vehicle movements away from overland flow lines is one measure that can be taken to reduce the volume and speed of water washing off the landscape
Unfortunately, politics or more specifically, political boundaries also need to be inserted into the flood prevention mix. In the past, much of the flood alleviation money was spent in the area it was allocated to, usually in building hard defences. However, it is slowly being accepted that funds allocated to one area’s flood defence are often better spent outside that area, i.e. further upstream. In the case of the Wye (and Severn), it means that much of England’s flood defence budget would be better spent across the border in Wales.
Is this likely to happen? Quite simply, it has to if the UK is to avoid the kind of catastrophic flooding seen on mainland Europe in 2021. If anything demands a joined-up, whole catchment-based approach, it is flood management. Yet despite this, Welsh and English Government funds must still be spent on their respective side of the border.
If anything requires a catchment-wide approach without political or administrative boundaries, it is flood management.
While there have been some calls for a more catchment based approach recently (including Jesse Norman MP in Parliament), the dogma of regionalism and popularism within our political systems should not be underestimated either. Only this week a local councillor in Llangadog was reported as berating Natural Resources Wales for not dredging the Tywi to prevent the town’s recent floods. Even if siltation was the cause of the flooding, there appeared to be no thought about how the sediment and floodwater got there in the first place and no appreciation that measures taken outside his “patch” could help stop it happening again.
It is not just local people and businesses that would benefit enormously from effective, natural, catchment-wide flood management. Our rivers would too. Severe flooding events damage their ecology, as do the increasing number of low water events that are made worse by the landscape’s inability to hold back water during wet periods and release it in drier times.
Farmers would also benefit. Their soils would be healthier and their businesses more profitable. Quite simply, everyone wins. There are no losers.
One of the Foundation’s current projects is working with the Ministry of Defence to reduce flood risk in the Usk valley by implementing natural flood management techniques. The MOD control large areas of land (shown in blue in the map above) on the Eppynt, the range of hills on the northern side of the upper Usk catchment where some upper Usk tributaries have their headwaters. We will be measuring closely the efficacy of this project but the benefits are likely to be felt miles downstream in entirely different administrative areas.
But doing this on a catchment the size of the Wye or Usk requires scientific knowledge of where natural flood management work would be best located and, of course, the funds to carry it out. The Foundation is using its soil, water and Geographical Information Systems (GIS) expertise to identify potential sites and to work with farmers and landowners such as the Ministry of Defence. The latter manage the Eppnyt (the range of hills on the northern side of the upper Usk valley), whose streams have a big influence on flooding further downriver.
We are also working with landowners in the Monnow, upper Wye and other parts of the upper Usk to determine what natural flood management measures can be undertaken and where.
Such partnerships will be crucial if the land in our catchments is to be managed in ways that alleviate floods rather than exacerbate them.
https://preview.mailerlite.com/h1b0i5q0j6/1897322206929622138/p8r6/
Note that they admit that last months rainfall from the three storms was nowhere near record levels – indeed a once-a-year event. Yet still they insist:
“Climate change is, of course, the reason for more intensive rainfall.”
But where is the evidence for this?
The charts below show monthly and daily rainfall data for SW England & S Wales , from the HADUKP series. Neither show any evidence of more extreme rainfall:
https://climexp.knmi.nl/getstations.cgi
As well as the degraded ability to catch water upstream, the authors could also have added the concreting over of upstream drainage. Where some of the rain would previously have been absorbed in fields, it now gets channelled very quickly into water courses.
All of this should be the focus of attention for the Environment Agency, who instead simply fall back on the excuse of climate change every time there is a flood.
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
The belief that this can be avoided by installing more solar and wind generation is insane. The speed of run off is a man made issue. Too many concreted developments etc. The focus must be on understanding all the land management practices which cause the rapid run off. Any farmer will tell you that flood run off removes his (or her or its) valuable top soil.
So, of course it’s CC, but then, changes in land management have also contributed – and I bet they don’t have the smarts (or the guts) to do the necessary analyses to figure out which it is.
If the result is a reduced budget, with redundancies, it’s not such a simple decision.
Where I live in the state of Maryland near Washington DC, our governor introduced a rain tax for any non-permeable (like a house or driveway) built on people’s property.
As silly as this may seem, how will covering pastural landscapes with solar panels affect the run-off and water holding capability of soils? Arrays of solar panels don’t look to be compatible with any of the recommendations in the article.
It’s not the solar panels in themselves — they’re normally mounted on frames to stand well up from the ground, and the frames have a small footprint — but that the ground beneath them becomes highly shaded (that’s the point, right? To get as much sun on the panels as possible), so that the ground cover changes, becoming thinner, lower, and less efficient at aerating the ground beneath the panels, thereby increasing runoff over time
I agree with that totally.
The only things that grow in heavily shaded areas are moss and brambles. Moss won’t really affect Solar PV, but brambles can grow out of the shade and over the panels in a few days. I don’t envy the people tasked with clearing the brambles which are the spawn of the devil him/herself.
Two things come to mind in relation to the erosion of land covered with PV panels:
1. Some land owners who are electricity ‘rent’ receivers keep sheep in the same fields to
graze under the panels thus compromising the porosity of the shaded grass and
stimulating the run-off.
2. The lower or bottom edge of each panel discharges accelerated water captured from the whole face of the panel thus giving greater erosive force to the water as it pours from the panel.
From the pictures the colour of the flood water suggests copious field topsoil in suspension.
I would say the sheep graze between the panels, access for people is needed for cleaning and maintenance, as what little if any grass grows under them will be poor quality and gradually swamped by moss varieties of which grow just about anywhere.
Solar panels are mounted above the ground.
Once their support struts are emplaced, seeding grasses beneath the panels would be beneficial.
So how does the grass underneath a solar panel get its required solar?
If I am not mistaken, it was the IPCC who changed the originally arbitrary unit of climate change from 50 years to another seemingly equally arbitrarily chosen 30 years. Now that is ONE data point. There is a problem instantly here because there are clear variations which are of a shorter duration.
Question, what is the minimum number of data points needed to form a trend (not that there is anything automatically significant in that)? The answer is THREE data points. This person is drawing conclusions based on events happening within 1-2 climate data points when it is exceedingly well documented that there are multiple weather cycles which over print each other each with a different cyclicity. I am sick and tired of the lack of guidance and challenge from people who “should” know better when garbage conclusions such as this are drawn. I bet your next months salary if I start digging I can find man made ( or unmade) causes of a substantial proportion of the subsequent flooding.
Another point that no one seems to mention because we are so clever is ditching and diking. My 93 year old mother repeatedly talks about the linemen who used to be out ditching and diking in October and also again in Feb/March to keep them clear. Next time you are out for a drive in the country, just take a look at the space between the hedge or fence and the road. There used to be a ditch there. Now the water just goes straight onto the road. As is said, you cannot fix stupid. We now have such wonderfully clever people with certificate like confetti working in the Environment Agency who can put a left wing political spin on any subject under their remit but who would in reality struggle to find beer in a brewery.
Funny I was thinking exactly the same on my walk yesterday.With a couple of exceptions all the ditches here are full of rubbish and have many trees growing in them as they have not been maintained for several decades.Climate change not .Man made stupidity.
Like Paul I’m a recreational/shopping cyclist, when I’m out I see that most ot the street drainage round Derby is poorly maintained. There’s always been grass parially blocking drains but since Desmon, Euphemia and Frank (or whatever there names were) there’s a lot ,ore debris than normal just waiting for a torrential fall of climate change to cause flooding.
When the family owned a caravan io a Welsh farm (1950’s) one of the farmworkers was the local ‘lengthsman’ whose part-time job was to keep the local ditches clear and hedges trimmed. Is this idea still kept up?
You really can’t get a trend from three data points either. I don’t see any trend in most of the data but the temperature data does show step changes associated with El Ninos. If they do produce higher atmospheric temperatures for 2-5 years and for whatever reason you get 2-3 in a row before temperatures have declined fully, you get a pseudo-trend. Perhaps increased CO2 slows the decline as well. All the other data is trendless.
Regenerative farming is one answer, with the banning of growing of maize for anaerobic digesters being another.
It’s not much on answer to the imminent food shortage, though, Philip; feed wheat hit £300/tonne on Friday!
…and no sign of stopping the business of turning food into fuel.
One third of the US corn crop (maize to us) goes to make ethanol for blending into petrol. Even before the present crisis that was indefensible while there is so much starvation and under-nourishment around the world.
By all means pay the farmers to produce but put the crops to beneficial uses.
The “EA” sadly has not moved on from being in the thrall of the EU. Its gone time for all these apologists to be sacked.
It is refreshing (and encouraging) that an article like this finds it’s way into print. Also good it’s to a large degree community focussed – which is where all of these matters should be attended to – in the community (but sharing best known methods from anywhere in the world with similar problems). Also really glad it’s focussing (for once) on soil. Yay! Been banging on about this for years – and I have the deepest respect for soil experts. Soil experts will have a BIG role to play in the years to come. It’s time to have some sensible, cross-discipline dialogue over what constitutes good environmental design. We are hearing less now from the Thunbergs (thank Christ) and it’s time to focus some quality time and energy on how best to integrate what we need – with what we have. Make the best use of experience, suppress excess moaning, respect hard data, push spin doctors and juvenile ‘media pundits’ out of the way – and start working some creative solutions. If it goes well – what shakes out will be amazing!
It is worth zooming in on the picture showing ‘puddling’. I cannot think of any time I have seen such an extreme example of over-grazing. Why on earth are the sheep still in that field?
It’s a common end state for fields where sheep and cattle have been grazing a crop of fodder beet which is planted after a main crop.
It’s not overgrazing. The sheep are gleaning the remains of a harvested crop, probably potatoes which otherwise grow back as weeds
Thanks to you and Jeremy for your comments. Perhaps, looking at the state of the soil, it is a practice that is detrimental to the soil condition, hence part of the problem being discussed? Old method was simply to till the soil, leaving it uncompacted and therefore aerated over winter, with any remainder of previous crop being left to decompose in the soil enhancing organic content and quality of the soil. I cannot imagine anything other than the soil losing its fertility and ability to absorb precipitation.
Have you done much farming?
Harrabin’s, Rowlatt and the rest on the BBC regularly cover beavers being reintroduced or released into the wild and how their dams will reduce flooding. But they never explain how.
In the situation we have just been through I am struggling to see how this works. The ground is waterlogged, rivers are at high levels beaver dams are full. Water is going straight through because it has nowhere else left to go. This situation doesn’t take long to happen. Once it does the beaver dam might as well not be there. It’s like a bath with the plug in and a dripping tap. Once the bath is full the water goes down the overflow, increasing the flow in will raise the level until flow in equals flow out again. This cycle repeats until the flow in exceeds the maximum of the overflow at which point the bathroom floods. Any delay is barely measurable.
I’ve no problem with beavers or their dams but how do they reduce flooding during periods of above average rainfall?
If it is any use to explain the situation, I can give you examples from areas where I have lived. In Bavaria, an almost war situation between greens and farmers upstream after reintroduction of beaver. Farmers upstream clearing the dams because of flooding of land. Here in Latvia they have always been around (and the meat in restaurants too!) in some areas, again responsible for flooding upstream. Drainage more necessary with increased agricultural use and hence dams often cleared. The dams are often built higher than the water level, so water level upstream needs to rise, as in your bath tub scenario. If exceptional rainfall is a one-off then they will potentially offset some of the flooding downstream. If however there has been previous high rainfall and the dam is already breached, then there will be no difference. So both scenarios can be true, depending on the circumstances.
Strange how the reverse scenario is never mentioned: In terms of drought periods, the situation is reversed. Upstream will benefit, downstream not. Hope that helps.
Thank you, nice to have some practical knowledge as an input.
Humans trying to prevent them. Did I guess right?
Many cities now require developments to include retention ponds. These collect the rapid run-off and allows the water to infiltrate (or be used). There is also “porous concrete” or similar surfaces. There are many possibilities. The idea is that something such as a tennis court or a large roof can be prevented from dumping rainwater into the local drainage or the waste (sewage) channels. Even burying large tanks is a possibility — then the water can be pumped out to use for irrigating a golf course, cricket field, or park. Do a little search-up with an “images” tab to see the many possibilities. A growing town near me is full of these sorts of things.
There is a problem with these SuDS ponds after a few years when the developer has moved on elsewhere nobody is required to look after the ponds etc. They need maintenance to effectively work they silt up and block just like any other drainage infrastructure.
However Government has decided not to give local councils the duty andbresources to look after such things. Often the only way development was allowed on flood plains was because of the mitigation of SuDS features, but nobody looks after the SuDS features.
Whaley Bridge flooded. Why? Unprecedented rainfall? Around 2 inches in 24 hours, records show in the 1800’s occasionally 4 inches fell in 24 hours. The victorian dam failed through lack of maintenance.
Llanberis flooded a few years back, heavy rain not quite unprecedented here in Snowdonia, reason…. the stream that burst its banks had been overgrown and neglected for years, again lack of maintenance.
As pointed out the gulleys and ditches were once regularly maintained.
When the Somerset levels flooded of course the climate was blamed, however, the EU directive to stop dredging was really guilty.
So if perhaps all the billions wasted on ‘renewables’ (what does that word mean?) were directed on maintenance of waterways, drainage etc the unprecedented flooding from not unprecedented rainfall may be averted.
The EA sent us that live along our river a stern letter after we cleared some Crow’s foot weed from said river. The weed grows quickly and densely and dramatically slows the river. After we cleared a patch the river dropped 3 inches but the letter warned us of such practices. They warned us that court action might ensue if we didn’t get a license from them to carry out any work within 8 metres of the riverbank or in the river that might affect the river. We would never get a license to clear the weed of course because of perceived ecological damage. Needless to say the EA refuses to dredge the river even though it is getting shallower because of the silt buildup. Yes, they blame CC and carry on running around checking river levels etc and demanding adherence to largely EU regulations. Totally not fit for purpose.
“Yet here we are faced with the kind of flood events we previously expected only once every 20 years.”
Aaaaargh!
That’s a complete misunderstanding of statistics. In 100 years it will happen five times. It might be five years in a row. How can people in charge of things nit understand the very basics of the information they use?
It’s quite obvious that such problems are being addressed by diverse agencies doing their own thing. While this article deals with excess water the background noise is of water shortages and the perils of modern loos, their leakage. It seems that many sub-agencies pursue local aims while a concerted effort is required; the headwaters, catchment areas, may have solutions distinctly unhelpful to areas further down the chain, passing the buck! As long as those in diverse structural management bodies keep wanting to be noticed, want to promote their innovation, the system as a whole is going to hell in a hand cart.
increasingly intensive rain
Is there any data on that? X amount of water arriving in an hour could be more of a problem than X amount over twelve hours, for example. Drainage per hour in a given location must have a limit.
There is constant mis-understanding about flood frequency, including from “experts”. There is a good explanatory here:
https://www.usgs.gov/special-topics/water-science-school/science/100-year-flood
“A 100-year flood happened last year so it won’t happen for another 99 years, right? Not exactly. Misinterpretation of terminology often leads to confusion about flood recurrence intervals.”
“The term “100-year flood” is used in an attempt to simplify the definition of a flood that statistically has a 1-percent chance of occurring in any given year. Likewise, the term “100-year storm” is used to define a rainfall event that statistically has this same 1-percent chance of occurring. In other words, over the course of 1 million years, these events would be expected to occur 10,000 times. But, just because it rained 10 inches in one day last year doesn’t mean it can’t rain 10 inches in one day again this year.”
It seems there was never any flooding before “climate change”, check out the British Hydrological Society, with a database for all river catchments in the UK, just enter the river catchment and you will get a history of flooding events going back in some cases to the 13th C. The Usk has a record going back to 1607. They also record periods of drought.
https://www.cbhe.hydrology.org.uk/search.php
Between 1840 and 1897, there were 11 flooding events along the Usk, followed by several very dry years.
There are records for the Wye going back to 1247, with many drought years at that time, as in summer 1305, “A drought affected the whole of Herefordshire and Worcestershire, accompanied by such burning heat that cattle died from lack of water …” There are further periods of drought in the record, “1538-1541: Extremely dry years … rivers and streams drying out in parts. A remarkable series of droughts, with a burning sun during the summer”
The 18th C brought more floods, ending with the Great Flood of 1795. The 19th century saw many serious flooding events on the Wye, but also some drought years. The worst in the 20th C was 1947, “The whole town of Shrewsbury was nearly cut off by water. Monmouth was in similar case. The River Wye reached its highest level for 155 years”
The analysis presented by Wye and Usk Foundation is good – up to a point. Good because it recognises the bleeding obvious that soil and agronomy advisers have been advocating for decades against the relentless drive for income from subsidies. Only up to a point because it caves to the necessity to be seen supporting the AGW narrative which is a prerequisite for any form of handout from the taxpayer.
Soils described as permeable and trafficable by the Soil Survey of England and Wales (remember them?) are now frequently nothing of the sort. Even on never-ploughed lowland parkland in Devon I have seen severe compaction at about 4″ depth. The consequence is that only a small amount of rain is needed to saturate to this shallow depth and once saturated the excess rainfall flows under gravity carrying with it soil particles that are no longer held in the soil matrix by organic matter. As a red tide to the nearest low point. Below the compacted layer soil may be so dry (in winter!) as to run freely through the fingers, whereas above the layer a person has difficulty standing up on the slippery thin mud. A major factor causing this compaction is the intensive grazing of sheep for winter “keep” on lowlands. There are others – economics have driven contractor harvesting of grass for silage using ever-larger machines with high work-rate which over the years have caused compaction at depth.
Regenerative land-management methods abound but will not in themselves provide the comprehensive fix that proponents suggest. Rehabilitation of soils will be a long process without mechanical intervention to break compacted layers to set up suitable conditions for regenerative processes. That and a widespread return to mixed farming in arable areas – which will enrage the fake food lobby no doubt.
And yet the latest government insanity is to pay farmers to let their land grow wild and not grow food.
No reference to the fact that increased flood prevention upstream means increased flooding downstream, or that more dredging will give the rivers a greater capacity for taking the water away more quickly..
I’ve got a mystery going on on my farm. I haven’t ploughed some fields for ten years, and as we are all told, ploughing is baaaaad. I switched to very mintill (Horsch tine drill). But I’m now getting more overwash and soil erosion than I’ve ever seen, over the top of hardened topsoils. Regular ploughing used to maintain the topsoil (aeration and incorpration of organic matter) and allow water to permeate in. It’s a terrible agri-incorrect thing to say, but my soil is definitely getting worse.
Thought provoking
The heading picture is very familiar as I grew up in Ross-on-Wye in the 50/60s and winter floods were regular events. One morning, on my paper round, I was whizzing down a hill towards the bottom end of town when I realised that the road was flooded at the lowest point. Nothing for it but to lift my feet and pray; luckily momentum carried me through.
It turned out the river had risen 16 feet overnight…..