Last year's floods ‘a sign of what's to come'
Wednesday 4 June 2008
'It is extraordinary that nobody in the country has any duty or responsibility to measure surface water flooding.'
Last year's floods were a ‘big wake up call for the country,' Chair of NHS South West and author of the forthcoming ‘Pitt Review' of the floods, Sir Michael Pitt, told delegates in the Public health and climate change session. ‘Climate change means more frequent extreme weather events - our weather will become more chaotic and floods like this are likely to happen more often. They were a sign of what is to come.'
It is extraordinary that there are still thousands of people unable to return to their homes and living in temporary accommodation, he said, and far too little thought has been given to the enormous psychological and emotional impact involved.
Fifty thousand properties were flooded, but the situation quickly snowballed into the loss of water and electricity supplies to hundreds of thousands of homes.‘One of the main conclusions we came to was that the country was not well prepared,' he said. 'The emergency escalated rapidly - things were happening that had not been planned for.'
The floods constituted the biggest and worst emergency to hit the country since WWII, with a cost of between £3bn and £4bn. A key problem was the poor quality of warnings, with large numbers of the properties flooded receiving no warning at all. There were also significant problems around predicting where the water would flow once it hit the ground, he said. 'It is extraordinary that nobody in the country has any duty or responsibility to measure surface water flooding.'
The Met Office and Environment Agency need to be working much more closely together for more accurate predictions of flooding, he stressed. ‘At the moment we can probably predict it to a county or a city. We need to get that to street level.' They also need to co-ordinate their messages in ‘nice, simple English.' 'Amazing things were done during the emergency by a whole variety of agencies,' he said, but it could have been so much better with more sharing of information, better communication and joint working.
The country's critical infrastructure, and its vulnerability to flooding, was a major focus of the review. Electricity stations and pumping stations became inoperable once flooded, with severe knock-on effects. There was no understanding of how vulnerable these sites were. The transport infrastructure was also hard hit, with 10,000 people stranded on the M5, and eight motorways closed in all.
'You begin to worry about some of our behaviours in this country,' Sir Michael said. While other countries run proactive education and awareness programmes, the UK remains secretive and paranoid. 'There's a feeling here that we need to keep critical infrastructure sites secret in case someone tries to blow them up. We need to move from a 'need to know' culture to a 'need to share' culture.'
It is essential to find ways to simplify the sharing of information on which life or death decisions are made, he said. While the Environment Agency were plotting how the floods were progressing minute by minute, Gold Command was ‘working off bits of paper'. His final report will recommend huge new responsibilities for local government – ‘there's no one else that you can sensibly give these responsibilities to.' Local authorities, however, have denuded themselves of technical experts in recent years which calls for a ‘technical and engineering renaissance' in local government.
It is also essential to help people to help themselves, he stressed. Many people in vulnerable areas were not insured or even connected to the Environment Agency's flood warning lines. ‘A lot of people are in real denial about this,' he said.
Watch Sir Michael Pitt's speech as part of the plenary session: Public health and climate change
Read the coverage from the Guardian: Flood inquiry head says next disaster waiting to happen