Government not putting enough effort into flood resilience despite likelihood of more frequent and severe storms, experts say
in the UK. This autumn, storms have caused thousands of homes in the UK to flood, and last week almost 150,000 households were left without power.
Trevor Hoey, professor of river science at Brunel University London and director of the Centre for Flood Risk and Resilience, said: “I am concerned that with all of the other priorities that governments at different levels have to deal with, this may not get the attention it perhaps deserves.“The risk is that we continue to be somewhat reactive. We wait until there has been a flood event and then we try to stop that event from occurring again in the same place in the future.
He said: “The National Infrastructure Commission has said that government should set a long-term measurable target to reduce the number of properties likely to be flooded by rivers or the sea. But government action cannot eliminate the risks from flooding, so regular stress tests and exercises should be conducted to ensure that we are able to cope with the extreme events that are expected in the future.
He added that building on floodplains meant excess water could not drain away due to the hard surfaces covering the natural route the water would otherwise have taken. “A lot of those are now covered over with hard surfaces means that some of the natural routes the water would have followed are now obstructed, and the water gets diverted. It ends up ponding up in certain areas and you get the sort of pictures that we have seen over the last few days, following Storm Ciarán.
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