What a start to a new year. More water than you can shake a stick at, at least the water companies haven’t made any noises about hosepipe bans! But it has been reported widely that the Environment Agency are cutting back jobs, but ‘not front line staff’ as reported by the Beeb. Even so it is a pretty poor announcement to make when people are getting flooded out, and rivers are bursting their banks. Which got me thinking: why are announcements like that made by ‘government’ departments at the most inappropriate time?

There have been other such inappropriate announcements over the years, and they seem to coincide with something bad happening or something they are trying to hide. On this occasion it couldn’t have been more insensitive, especially with the weather we’re all experiencing. Although luckily I live on a hill so we’ll never get flooded, or if we do, the world’s coming to an end. But what’s the solution? Funnily enough not many pundits on the news offer a solution, but I have a few ideas of my own:

Dredge every river that is currently bursting its banks, there’s obviously not enough depth to carry extra water away.

Shore up obvious overflow areas on sea sides and river sides.

Don’t build houses on flood plains or too close to flowing water, you never know when flooding may occur.

These measures will of course cost money, maybe we can reduce the millions of pounds of aid money we send to countries which patently don’t need it to pay for it. I don’t hear other countries saying they’re sending teams of aid workers here to help us out. Sometimes we could do with help, so why not? Just because we’re ‘first world’, and in the main the countries we aid are ‘third world’, doesn’t mean we couldn’t use help, we’re all affected by nature. I feel really sorry for those who have been flooded, but not those who chose to go for a walk to ‘watch’ the waves. Trouble is the emergency services have to put themselves at risk to rescue people, but I doubt they think of that.