OneOffDave

It should be an interesting weekend for me as I'm on call for all of it and covering all of Norfolk and bits of Suffolk!

I'm sure they knew but, given the scale of the event, what action could they have taken? If they'd told people to evacuate early, would they have done? As the event was beyond the scale of anything in living memory, people would have real difficulty percieveing just how much risk they are in.

The Council has no legal duty to provide sandbags and it's not funded out of either council tax or the central govt funding. Polypropylene sandbags are fairly poor at flood protection anyway, they deteriroiate rapidly due to UV attack so have to be kept indoors and weigh about 20-25kg each. A sandbag bund needs to be twice as wide as it is tall so for a 3 foot wall in a standard doorway you need 135 bags. This is 2.7-3.3 tonnes of sand. Multiply this across a settlement and you are talking vast amounts. With water depths in excess of 10 feet and velocities so high that the Fire and Rescue Service was unable to deploy their boats as they wouldn't be able to even keep station, sandbags would be a waste of time. The council will have been in regular contact with the area Public Weather Service Advisor from the Met Office and the Flood Forecasting Centre has been issuing guidance that's been very accurate since Tuesday. I know several of the emergency planners in the area and they all worked through the Carlisle flooding and are excellent professionals. This level of rainfall is an extreme event and to keep the kinds of resouces to significantly mitigate this very rare event would have a significant impact on council tax for the area. I don't know many people who'd be prepared to pay an extra £200-£300 a year for an event that occurs once every 50 years or so. Business owners need to take responsibility for the protection of thier own property, sign up for flood warnings and have appropriate protection in place.

The remains of supermarket shopping trollies will indicate the course of former streams, rivers, culverts and canals!

I've sailed on the "Nellie" from Alicante to the Canaries and she's a great ship. Well worth a trip.

The significant volcanic and forest fire events coupled with increased smog levels in the country must play quite a part in thses figures I'm sure. I would suspect that impaired lung function would also increase vulnerability to or the impact of viruses.

Part of the problem is that teh next flu pandemic may be H5N1, H5N2 or some othere strain. Tamiflu and the like aren't brilliant but they are often better than doning nothing, particularly amoungst high risk groups, key workers and closed populations like boarding schools, prisions and the like. The big issues about any pandemic aren't the crude M&M figures (a lot of which may just be early culling rather than significant population die off) but how widerspread absenteeism would affect the economy. The problem is that we have no meaningful experince to base any judgement on for this kind of event. Dave

I was at an event on Wednesday and there were muttering about an H5N2 varianet that could be interesting.

I was living just east of Southampton at the time. I remember sitting in bed hearing the wind build about 10pm. A bit later we lost the power. As I was still living at home (just about to turn 20) and had the next day off work, I decided to stay up and reset the alarm when the power came on again so I could wake mum up as she had work. We got power back about 30 min later so I thought everything was all right. About 15 min later we lost power again and were then without it until about mid day on the Sunday. I sat in bed watching my large bedroom window flex with the wind and hearing fences come down. I could see what I thought were distant flashes of lightning but I assume they must have been power lines shorting out. I remember going downstairs that the wind of the noise being so loud that my mum didn't hear me coming downstairs and we frightened the life out of each other as neither of us knew the other was up. In the morning we came out to survey the damage. We'd come off pretty lightly with just a fence panel or two broken by falling branches of the trres form the neighbour's garden and half the foor of the shed flipped over the other half like a book, At first we thought we'd lost it totally but looking closer we could see what had happened. With no power on the Friday evening I remember playing cards by candlelight and listening to Nick Girdler's show on Radio Solent with people phoning in and sharing their 'storm stories'.

In second hand book shops it's always worth keeping an eye out for Eric Delderfield's book about the floods that was published not too long after the event. A very interesting read, and is interesting to compare with the reports about Boscastle.

Off the top of my head, Norfolk has 50ish. 17 on the area I cover.

We have them on the coast here in Norfolk but, unlike other places, ours are for evacuation rather than warning. I'm not a big fan as it's WWII technology with very little resilience and if you are still sat at home when they are sounded it's going to be far to late to start thinking about evacuation. They are effectively a last ditch warning. They were introduced as a warning method after the floods of 1953, where lack of warning was one of the big issues. The better forecasting and availability of communicatiosn these days does make them a little redundant I think. Also very worrying if you are unable to evacuate and hear them.

In certain circumstances, there may be that long without mains water as until the water goes down enough and the infrastructure can be repaired, potable water may not be able to be provided. If contaminated water has entered the system, it also has to be flushed. In these circumstances, the water utilities have a statutory duty to provide alternative supplies of potable water, including delivering supplies to vulnerable customers. Those most at risk from water bourne diseases are those who are already immuno-supressed due to medical treatment or disease, the rest of us are most likely to just get a bad stomach. Though, as always, standard hygeine practices should protect everyone.

Apologies for going a bit OT Probelms with sandbags are they need to be kept somewhere dry and dark or they fail within 6-8 months so if you stockpile a reasonable number, you are replacing them frequently. Another problem with them is the distribution. A full wet sandbag weighs about 25kg, a pallet full of then weighs a tonne. You need vehicles, and more importantly, people to load, unload and distribute these in the critical times. We knew this rain event was going to happen, but not the exact scale or location. Would have been very expensive and politically damaging for us (as an unaffected area) to have say, cancelled all our street cleaning and bin collection to have staff on standby to dish out the bags. Local 'dumps' create even more problems with wasteage, costs for premises, maintaining access etc. And to top all that off, provision of flood protection equipment to individual households isn't a statutory duty of local authorities, with the focus being on protecting the infrastructure. I'm also not keen on sandbags as a measure when proper flood defences are much better as long as they are stored locally, not like those that didn't make it to Upton on Severn. I agree totally about the local knowledge about dykes, drains, ditches etc. Lose that knowledge and it's gone forever. As for central London Flooding, I daren't begin to estimate the financial impact. Dave Sandbag Guru

The real danger for London would be rainfall like we've just had and a low pressure system tracking down the North Sea, adding storm surge residuals to the standard astronomical tides, creating tide-locking as is quite common on the Broads. Ring fencing the EA's funding and not making it pay for the mistakes of other bits of DEFRA would be a good start. Stopping our over relaince on local authority provided sandbags would also be good.

I have a 44 mile round trip to work and also have to have my car available for work so don't really have any choice but to drive. My last job involved a 120mile round trip every day and the lack of frequent public transport (only one train every hour in rush hour and every other hour outside of that) meant that it wasn't a viable option. Had there been one every half hour, I'm sure I would have used it as it would have made life less stressful.

How would you find where you'd left it?

I was working in central Southampton at the time and we were forced to stay in the office as the corrugated iron sheeting on a building site across the road was coming loose from the scaffolding and penetrating the roofs of cars parked below. A number of the larger trees on The Avenue and in the city centre parks came down, closing several roads in the city centre for some time. That eveing I remember it being very still and some friends and I went out into the countryside near Bishops Waltham and Cheesefoot Head to see how bad it had been. A journey to a pub that usually took 30 minutes took 2 hours due to finding diversions around roads blocked by fallen trees. It was all in vain as when we got to the pub, there was no power and it was shut! Dave