Telegraph, April 2012
Residents in flood risk areas have been offered free sandbags to help protect their properties from rising water levels despite much of the country being declared in drought.
Motorists across swaths of Britain were also warned of travel chaos and were urged to drive carefully as heavy rain threatens road networks. Forecasters predicted “heavy showers” across much of England and Wales on Thursday, with the wet weather set to continue for the next week.
The Environment Agency warned householders in many areas that their homes were at risk from flooding due to the recent heavy rain.
Officials offered them free sandbags to build barriers around their properties, advised them to move their possessions away from the ground floor and offered them temporary flood barriers .
More than 40 flood alerts were in place across the rest of the country, just a week after Britain was slowly turning into a dust bowl after months of drought conditions and a hosepipe ban affecting millions of people. The spate of torrential rain has put Britain on course for the wettest April on record.
The warnings were issued for southern England, the North East and the Midlands after rivers were judged likely to break their banks following a week of heavy rain. The agency said five flood warnings remained in place in south-west England where some areas saw up to two inches (50mm) of rain on Wednesday.
Roz Codling, 23, who lives in Ottery St Mary said she had been offered sandbags after the River Otter came within 100 yards of her house.
“The Environment Agency has said they can supply us with sandbags and the blue floodgates but we have to pay for the floodgates, and we have to go and pick up the sandbags,” the mother of one said.
“We’re keeping our fingers crossed because we live at the bottom of a valley.”
Lynn Thurgate, owner of the Tumbling Weir Hotel in Ottery St Mary, said: “We had advice from the Environment Agency to move things to upper levels. We have had an awful lot of rain – it has rained solidly.”
The Environment Agency sent through a series of automated telephone warnings about the flooding on Wednesday morning to people in the area.
The risk of flooding is made worse because parts of England are in the midst of one of the worst droughts since records began. The hard ground means that water is likely to rush off instead of sinking in.
Fluvial Innovations comment:
Sandbagging still seems to be the last port of call for immediate flood protection. However there is extremely strong evidence that using sandbags to assemble flood defences to protect property is completely ineffective.
Problems with sandbags:
- Time consuming and labour intensive to assemble into flood defences
- Prone to leakage
- Can only be used once, not reusable
- Viral and bacterial infections often present in flood water get transposed onto the porous hessian sacks.