Model Railway Forum

Yes it did, Datchet had terrible floods but the wealthy along the river around Maidenhead were fine.

I always worry that central London could be hit by a flood. Not wanting to be a doom and gloom merchant, but I read a book called "Flood" and there has been a made for TV movie, where really bad weather had vast amounts of water coming down the Thames, and a bad storm pushed a tidal surge down the North Sea - which created a very high tide in the Thames. The Thames Barrier was closed to stop the tidal surge, but that then stopped the water coming down the Thames getting out - result flood chaos - it could happen. I've walked across Waterloo Bridge hundreds of times, and seen the water only three or four feet below the top of the wall along the Embankment at high tide - if that wall were breached, it would flood the underground instantly.

This is where the runoff from our part of town ends up. Took the drone out to capture my son’s cricket ground - still a bit too windy really.
Nowhere near as bad as some have suffered but the whole field was covered at the weekend - no wonder it’s known as ‘Frog Island’.

But it was a successful flight even down to the manual landing right on the landing pad.

As the world warms up, (and unless you are the President of the USA I think most people agree it is) , more energy finds its way into the atmosphere. This in turn picks up more moisture from the oceans, by evaporation, and when it gets too saturated, it drops it, usually all over the high places, but everywhere else as well.

Rain and snow on mountains is subject to gravity which tends to bring it down to the lower lands.

At the same time as the result of warmer atmosphere a lot of the ice at the Polar regions is melting, which has to go somewhere and this is slowly raising the sea levels.

And at the same time farmers are cutting down trees in the world's forests, to grow more crops, and forests and jungles are where a lot of water was being stored. This allows the rain when it falls to enter rivers more rapidly, and it has to find somewhere to go.

Over the centuries action of wind and water has shaped our landscape to cope with the normal levels of precipitation. If then suddenly the amount of water coming down increases the landscape is no longer able to cope, and water has to find its own level.

The root cause however is over-population. There is more demand for food, and manufactured goods, and this produces greater demand for energy which in turn increases all the pressures already mentioned. Unless we reverse the trend for more and more births and in fact take measures to reduce population throughout the world the problem will only get worse.

So the answer to this is Stop having Children!

I realise a lot of property affected by recent flooding has been there for donkeys years but there is an increasing trend due to social and economic pressure to build new housing on any available land, suitable or not, much being low lying that may have not seen flooding in living memory but will affect the natural drainage ecology. Flood plains were there for a purpose.
Driving across the Fens last week my sat nav was reporting elevations below sea level and folk had built houses along that road. The adjacent fen flood drain was well above road level.
I remember looking at some new build housing in Cambridgeshire which was selling like hot cakes, so I missed out - fortunately as it turned out. Years later the same vast estate was having real problems with land heave and some housing was made uninhabitable as a result.

They have just built some houses on a flood plain in Aylesbury right next to the Grand Union Canal.