[Music]
In a civilised society, in an advanced nation like Britain, or we think we're an advanced
nation, and this shouldn't be happening and that's why this flood's different.
2007 you know,we had ten times as many houses flooded as we have now, but the level of outrage this time is off the scale.
Let's be quite clear, in case there's any doubt, it isn't
possible to prevent flooding entirely. You can reduce the risk, but you can't eliminate
the probability, if, if you're in a coastal, or a river, or an upland floodplain.
Now, having said that of course, you can do quite a bit, through defences and through
natural flood management to reduce the probability. Recognising that if you live in those areas,
there is a chance you'll be flooded, it behoves you then to be prepared for that unfortunate
eventuality. And what Flood Foresight showed is that you can do a lot to reduce the consequences
of flooding, when it does occur. That involves preparedness, it involves good emergency planning,
not just by government, not just by local authorities, not just by first responders,
but by individuals. And it involves having the right resources available to you when
you need them. And I find it just horrific that people are waiting for sandbags to be
delivered in 2014. I mean it's the anniversary of the First World War and the sandbag is
a First World War piece of kit and it's not even particularly good at preventing flood waters.
There are proprietary products.
Sorry about that.
Farmers already do that in, in many locations and it will become more widespread. We need
to find a way of helping them to do that without going out of business.
If we improve flood defences, if we also improve Land Management to hold back more flood waters
in the head waters of rivers, we make hard choices about where to defend and where to
retreat along the coast. And coast flooding is different. The volumes of water involved
are immense. You can't mess about with that, because if, if you get flooded in the coastal
floodplain you, you may get killed, never mind just inconvenienced.
So we've got to be very careful. And, of course, everybody's at flood risk if enough water
falls out of the sky, if it falls out the sky quicker than the drainage system will
carry it away. So we're all actually at flood risk to a greater or lesser degree. And if
that flood risk stays the same and we improve our flood management, we'll be really glad we did it.
If climate change is real, and if this isn't climate change it looks awfully like it to
me, these are exactly the sorts of floods that we predicted in 2004. They're just twenty
years earlier than we thought. And if that is how it turns out, then we'll be mightily
glad that we took the hard decisions and did, did the right things now.
We've lived off the legacy of Victorian engineers for a hundred and fifty years now, and the
drains that we've got were not designed for the sorts of rainfall intensities that we
get these days. And the fact of the matter is, we need to put some investment into sustainable
urban drainage, or SUDs as it's called.
If you make space for what's, what's called green infrastructure, so green areas that
are receptive to flood waters, that are tolerant in fact, which, which are quite suitable for
flooding, then you can keep water off the road and out the houses.
We've got to be very, very selective in where we spend the extremely large amounts of money
that are necessary to, to defend against coastal flooding and erosion.
So let me give you an example. The Thames Barrier, it's been closed 29 times in the
last 10 weeks, which is a fifth of all the times it's been closed since 1983. So that
barrier is, we're getting value for money out of it. But we don't have a barrier like
that on the Humber, or the Bristol Channel, or the Forth, or the Clyde estuary. Why not?
Well, because they're not London. Now, we have to look at all of our big estuaries,
we have to look at all of our coastal cities and make some tough choices about whether
we're going to get serious about protecting them against coastal flooding or not. And
if we're not, then we need to do something else.
Flood risk management science in the UK's as good as anywhere in the world. You know
the, the Foresight Team, the technical team have also worked in Russia it worked in China,
they've worked in the United States. Most recently, they've worked in Australia because
of the dreadful Queensland floods and Brisbane. And, and they don't fly us over there for,
for grins. They fly us over there because our integrated approach, our sustainable approach
to flood risk management research, at least, is, is the best there is. What we have to
do is speed up the rate at which we turn the new science into actions and that's because
everything seems to be happening quicker than we expected and we don't have as much time
as we thought.
We absolutely have to get on with it. We don't have, we don't have any time at all. We didn't
think we had much time, now it looks like we haven't got any time.