All media is awash with stories about floods, travel disruption and how the climate may be changing. I certainly feel sorry for those people whose homes or businesses have been damaged but these events are not exceptional.
In my 70 odd years of life I and my family have seen it all before. We had trees blown over a few years ago in our garden, and in 1987 I could not get to work as trees blocked the road between Chislehurst and Orpington. My wife insisted on waking me up that night otherwise I would have slept through it. I certainly remember that storm.
My wife had her parental home flooded in the 1953 North Sea storm surge in Sheerness, since avoided by a higher sea wall. My grandmother regularly had her house flooded in Wilford near Nottingham by the River Trent bursting its banks – since prevented by flood prevention measures.
In Orpington where I had an office in the 1980s the car park regularly got flooded to a depth of over 6 feet and it happened so quickly that users were unable to move their cars in time. This was due to inadequate drains in the High Street.
I think the moral of these events is don’t buy a house next to a river or near the sea (even tsunamis are a threat to parts of the UK). And check the local drain system.
Yesterday was certainly windy – I had some difficulty walking from the car park to the A&E unit at Farnborough hospital (PRUH) on Sunday morning. But the service there was excellent to deal with a bleeding fistula. All resolved in about one hour. There are many complaints from the public about the NHS but I have found emergencies are usually dealt with quickly and efficiently. There are some problems in other services though which I won’t go into here. And I am getting quite fed up with the number of text messages I get from the NHS. They repeatedly send me messages to which I cannot respond.
Even though the winds were very strong this weekend, most of the trees had already lost their leaves which means few of them blew over around here.
The longer one lives, the more exceptional climate events one experiences. These are random events not the result of significant climate changes. Rail and road operators should anticipate such events and build the infrastructure with sufficient resilience.
Roger Lawson (Twitter: https://twitter.com/RogerWLawson )
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