It's their fault...........

I missed QT, but why so early in the day did you raise my blood pressure! Perhaps they should ask themselves how much of Holland is below sea level. I know parts of Holland pretty well and the management of the poulders is superb.

The Somerset levels have been managed for at least a thousand years and some flooding occurs every winter. But this is unprecedented.

When I say managed it has, apart from the last 20 years or so. People see pictures on the TV and think it is just a bit of water. What they forget is that the majority of people in that area are on septic tank or cesspit drainage. So, what looks like nice clean rainwater is anything and everything but.

I owned a factory which was flooded once. The sea wall was breached, and there is not a lot left after 4' of seawater rips through the place complete with oil timber sewage and everything else. Insurance? Oh yes of course I was fully insured. The only problem being that the insurance company reckoned I was underinsured, so what I got out of them was a pittance.

France's Atlantic tip on red alert for floods

The most westerly part of France was placed on a red alert for potential flooding on Thursday as high tides and ferocious storms wreaked havoc up and down Europe's Atlantic coast.

Finestere, a department of Brittany which juts out into the Ocean, was braced for two of its rivers, the Morlaix and the Laita to burst their banks as a result of heavy rain forecast for Thursday.

The highest-level warning was issued by Meteo-France shortly after the forecasting agency placed 29 departments from Brittany to the Paris region on a second-tier orange alert for high winds and heavy rain with the potential to bring down trees and power lines and make driving extremely dangerous.

Recent days have seen huge waves, gale-force winds and torrential rains combine to batter sea defences from the Basque country on France's border with Spain up to Devon and Cornwall in the southwest of England.

The storms sent a Spanish cargo ship crashing into a sea wall at the French port of Bayonne on Wednesday, splitting it clean in two.

There has been similar chaos in Britain with the coastal railway line linking Devon and Cornwall having been cut and the safety of dozens of clifftop homes increasingly threatened by coastal erosion caused by the storms





There has been flooding as far south as Bordeaux ,my son tells me.

Back at the end of the 20th century, we had a storm of giant proportion.
We live in forest country and 1/3 of the trees were felled in six hours. All roads were impassible and we had no electric or water for 6 weeks. We saw the millenium in sitting round a long fire with sandwiches. Illumination was by candles ,dished out on a weekly basis ,by the Mairie. 14 years later there are still signs of the devestation.


I sympathise and empathise...

Soundbite Dave arrives , spouting the most annoying platitude of all.....

SOMERSET FLOODS: Prime Minister says there are "lessons to learn"

'Lessons to learn' and 'something must be done' are similarly pretty unhelpful. And Nigel Farage went as well. Whether Ed goes remains to be seen.

I have not spoken to my friend down there for a couple of days - last time we spoke he was up to his thighs in water and sewage trying to rescue cattle. His livelihood as it happens.

But I see the Thames valley is now suffering. Shock horror, some of these people have children at good schools and live in nice (rather expensive) houses. So all three of the armed services have been busy building the barricades. The response was a tad quicker than was the case in that little sleepy backwater which is quaint but unimportant.