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In the next 25 years the Environmental Agency reckons up to 1 in 4 homes (a rise from 6.3m to 8m homes) will be liable to flooding (from rivers, sea or surface water) due to climate change.
Well, of course you could limit that by stop building on flood plains (which they're still doing round here) or by making estates better able to deal with flooding... less hardscaping etc.
But, what we *will* see is both more costly insurance & cover withdrawal!
h/t FT
It's interesting that more and more people will no longer be able to use the "it only happens to other people" line. They still won't get that it's #climatechange though and will still vote for right wing and far right wing politicians. Mind you, the left wing aren't doing us any favours, at all.
@ChrisMayLA6 think there is already a huge issue with insurance about this. We have a road and a small field between us and the river. We are about 10 miles from the source of the Ribble. Our house is about 15 m higher than the normal river water level and the river drops to a large flood plain area a few miles downstream. If we flood about 70% of the UK will be underwater. However when our home insurance was up for renewal, instead of being offered a quote they said they were 'declining to renew our policy'. We have never claimed in 15 years and when we asked if this meant a 'refusal to insure' which could have implications for getting a policy elsewhere..they said no. Declining to renew is apparently not a refusal of cover! So we just got cover from someone else ..but if we are being 'declined' and seen as high risk by insurers feels like this is a slippery slope.
Yes, my sister live in a village with a river running though it that has never flooded the houses in the village, yet some people are having the same problem.... makes a mockery of the idea of 'insurance'
@ChrisMayLA6 It's where the realities of nature bump up against needing more housing, can't build on floodplains when devastating rare events become more common and the space needed for floodplains grow due to rising water levels.
That's a great point about flood plains not being static & expanding in response to climate change - obvious once you state it, but just hadn't occurred to me - thanks (and boosted)
@ChrisMayLA6 @nini though of course floodplains have always flooded (clues in the name) - the floods only become devastating and catastrophic when people build there
@nini @ChrisMayLA6 houses on piles that can float .
@ChrisMayLA6
Our bronze age ancestors built in the fens - on stilts. In places where flooding was less common but still possible medieval houses were built with a raised floor and a semi basement that could be used for storage most of the time but could be emptied and allowed to flood from time to time. We seem to have lost the knack of building flood resilient housing.
@RussCheshire
yes, the future we've gone back to seems mostly to be the rapacious capitalism of C19th, not early forms of response to climate change....
@pthane @ChrisMayLA6 @RussCheshire if we haven’t got enough builders do we have enough boat builders? Concrete base, services by flexible connectors, fully anchored just in case
@John_Loader @pthane @RussCheshire
I think I saw a house like that on Grand Designs a few years ago....
@ChrisMayLA6 @pthane @RussCheshire Thames . Bit over top for what is necessary and Dutch do it more efficiently.
@John_Loader
There are a load of houseboats in a marina near here. They are just concrete (Ferro-cement) pontoons with mobile homes mounted on top.
@ChrisMayLA6 @RussCheshire
@pthane @ChrisMayLA6 @RussCheshire but they don’t need to be in the water all the time. Built on land they’d only need to float in floods . Only difference would be a concrete foundation pad to rest on in dry weather
@pthane @ChrisMayLA6 @RussCheshire
I have seen dwellings in parts of #SouthEastAsia which observe these rules still - one benefit from travel over the years!
@djr2024
Conventional UK houses are built on a concrete slab. It surely would cost to much to cast that slab 2-3 metres of the ground supported on concrete piles. Provide a concrete staircase up to it then build as normal. Most of the year it could be a car port, workspace, sheltered BBQ area, bike store etc. To be cleared when there's a flood warning. Also build a multi story car park in each housing estate with free parking on upper floors when there's a flood.
@ChrisMayLA6 @RussCheshire
@pthane @ChrisMayLA6 @RussCheshire I've always wanted to live on a houseboat.
⧖ @ChrisMayLA6 Decades of allowing people to tarmac or pave the front of their house for car parking can’t help. Decades of local authority neglect of local watercourses and culverts can’t help. The problem isn’t just being in a flood plain or near sea level. Pluvial flooding can work at any elevation, given inadequate drainage.
@ChrisMayLA6 Where I live we have our street drains cleaned out every year but we’ve still got to worry about whether the local drains might back up on their way to the brook outfall half a mile away.
@christineburns @ChrisMayLA6 Where I live, most road gullies are not cleared ever, so mostly are blocked. The inevitable consequence is flooding, deterioration of the road surface etc.
If you are really persistent and report blocked gullies, they may get emptied in a year or so!
It's as if drainage isn't important (clearly it is)!
yes we have a problem with massive tractors used by farmers crossing & cracking sub-road drainage pipes - just up-hill from me there's a section of read that has been dug up to replace wrecked drains three times in the last five years..... but as its a farming area, people are not saying its the massive tractors that are the problem....
@ChrisMayLA6 @christineburns Not entirely predictably, I’d say tractors are not the problem.
Road drainage should be built to D400 (40-tonne) specs, which means stronger surface bits, & deeper trenched, protected drains.
Hard up councils will use the cheapest standard that would just about support a bike. There’s always money to fix it when it breaks, but not to do it properly once.
(HGVs are usually the problem, with their smaller tyres)
@BashStKid @ChrisMayLA6 @christineburns I'm not sure what standards are used for new roads, but most of the rural roads round here were built in the first half of the 20th century. I doubt that the drainage designs considered 40 tonne trucks.
@AndyDeardentsa @ChrisMayLA6 @christineburns Probably not, but that was one of the things that was supposed to be fixed in the 50s & 60s as roads were designated for adoption and upgrading. Of course, it often wasn’t, and back B roads didn’t exist for the MoT.
@christineburns @ChrisMayLA6 most councils demand porous surfaces for parking
@ChrisMayLA6 @John_Loader Indeed, but just a short tour of this locale reveals plenty who’ve not only ignored that byelaw but also lacquered the stones they laid with a shiny surface
@christineburns @ChrisMayLA6 I might add that the building standards for assessing water drainage & displacement don’t have much to do with the laws of physics, more that they’re easy to do as a tabletop engineering exercise and tick some boxes. In a nutshell, they pay too much attention to local volumes and not enough to rate bottlenecks.
@ChrisMayLA6 building on a flood plain isn't inherently bad. As long as you design the buildings properly. Taking a design from elsewhere and just building it on the flood plain is a recipe for disaster. But building buildings designed for a flood plain allows for better land use. I wrote a thread about it a while ago.
@quixoticgeek @ChrisMayLA6 You’re quite correct, but as you know, the UK can’t even build to current safety standards, let alone do something innovative and not a scam in any way.
Not to mention the longstanding corruption of the building standards codes by the industry, and the fragmentation of responsibilities for where water comes from and goes to.