Storm Ciaran

This was a powerful storm, bringing fast winds and heavy rain. Inland areas have natural barriers against the weather. Talking about hills, trees and other natural barriers that exist in huge numbers. Coastal zones don’t have that luxury. Humans love to live near coastal areas making the problem even worse.

Windy weather creates falling trees and damage to property due to stuff not being secured down. Heavy rain creates a deadly flooding problem, all that water works its way into the river system. Grounds already saturated can’t hold any more water, and new rainwater starts to fill up rivers downstream. At some stage that means rivers bursting their banks as the water tries to go somewhere. High amounts of rain can overwhelm human-built water networks or structures.

Climate change is making the world warmer, and wetter and weather patterns more extreme. All this causes huge headaches as people demand to be protected. For some people that means it makes no sense to build protections or prevention schemes. Living in high-risk areas makes insurance impossible, becomes unviable to live there anymore. On a global scale that means huge amounts of people moving somewhere else.

Flood protection schemes only work if you have a strong set of prevention schemes to work alongside them. Nature has the answer already, wetlands, flood plains and more. Water is rather difficult to control at the best of times. Yet we keep trying to engineer complicated solutions when the answers already exist. I’m very lucky that I live in a low-risk area but I still face disruption from storms like this. The odd road may end up being flooded or a railway line gets flooded. 

Dying days of this government means we are unlikely to get a rethink about this problem.  Very quickly going to become a problem. If storms like this become even more common the calls to do something will be deafening. It will mean having to deal with vested interests and honest discussions about the hard choices ahead. I don’t have much faith in the quality maybe things will be different.