27 June 2007Jonathan Brown
Heavy rain looks set to bring more floods across Britain as emergency services battleto cope with the effects of the monsoon summer conditions.
The Met Office warned that heavy showers would give way to a frontal system bringing rain from the Atlantic by Saturday. Another deluge on a par with Monday's storm, in which four inches of rain fell in 24 hours, threatens to overwhelm dangerously high rivers.
The floods have so far claimed the lives of four people, including a man whose body was recovered in Worcestershire yesterday after his Volvo estate was swept away as he crossed a ford in Pershore on Monday afternoon.
Damage to thousands of homes and businesses is estimated to have run into hundreds of millions of pounds.
The Environment Secretary, David Miliband, was forced yesterday to defend the Government's record on flood defences. In an emergency Commons statement he insisted that barriers had held firm after facing the "ultimate test". But critics claimed he had cut the budget despite growing concerns over extreme weather. Mr Miliband told MPs that some 1,400 people were facing a second night in emergency shelters after flash floods ripped through towns and cities affecting 1,000 properties.
He warned: "Heavy rain later in the week remains a real threat and all the appropriate agencies remain on high alert."
Firefighters and engineers in South Yorkshire, where two people died, battled to prevent the Ulley dam, near Rotherham, from collapsing. Some 700 people have been moved out of the area and the nearby M1 last night remained closed in both directions between junctions 32 and 34 because of the risk of the dam breaking. The Environment Agency issued 26 severe flood alerts on rivers and waterways, with warnings on more than 200 others, mainly in the North, the Midlands and eastern England. Worst affected was the river Don in Sheffield which was threatening to burst its banks in seven places.
Tony Blair, who was holding talks on climate change at Downing Street with the California Governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, described this week's storm as an "extraordinary and very serious event". The Government said emergency financial assistance would be made available to councils. "Some of the rainfall we have seen you would only expect to happen once in every 140 years," Mr Blair said.
The Environment Agency said the damage was caused when Victorian sewers were overwhelmed on Monday. But water also breached flood barriers on some rivers. The agency's flood expert, Phil Rothwell, said: "We've had a sixth of the annual rainfall in 12 hours. Experts tell us this is the sort of thing we need to expect in the future." A recent National Audit Office report found that more than half the flood defences in high-risk areas were not up to scratch.
http://environment.independent.co.uk/lifestyle/article2714178.ece
