The Damage Of Flooding Throughout The UK
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It’s time to break out the wellies and raincoats. For those keeping track of the torrential downpour we suffered over New Year’s Eve, 2012 came fantastically close to being the wettest UK year in recorded history. Unfortunately it was beat out by 2000, with around 1337.3mm of rain. Considering the drought measures put in place earlier in 2012, the fact we only came 6.6mm short of the wettest UK year in history was surprising, to say the least. Though they seem like a distant memory now, the south of England experienced hosepipe and sprinkler bans from 5th April, with groundwater levels far below their usual amounts.
In the countryside floods arrived in full force. Public events have been cancelled, Cheltenham racecourse had to cancel their New Year’s racing events because parts of the course were residing comfortably underwater. Throughout the country drivers can see horses and cows paddling around in the flooded plains, trying to find the odd mound of greenery to feed from in overwhelming fields of water.
The soggy state of 2012 has created dire results for British farmers, who are currently clamouring for the right to grow GM foods to combat the diseases the weather brings. Blight is a disease affecting the foliage and tubers potatoes and tomatoes, two of the most widely farmed products in the UK. It’s caused by an organism similar to a fungus, rotting the plants and rendering them inedible. The affliction spreads rapidly in wet weather and wreaked severe damage on local farmers’ profits over the latter half of the year. Attempts to recover are slow, and experts suspect the pattern of heavy rainfall and flooding may continue, though hopefully not reaching recent levels for a good long time. Worried farmers anticipating future floods have called for more use of GM crops, grown with specific weather resistant traits, combatting the risks our extreme weather carries.
Of course, moving out of the countryside isn’t enough to escape the floods. Where a few towns in the south experienced heavy snow for a brief time, for most of the country precipitation came in the form of non-stop rain. It progressed beyond mere inconvenience when 265 flood warnings were issued throughout the UK, announcing flooding as predicted, and a further 288 alerts were issued to inform communities of possible flooding. By New Year’s over eight thousand homes had been severely damaged by flooding. For a time some York streets were flooded to waist level, and many more homes in Cornwall have been evacuated in response to the constantly rising water levels.
With any luck we’ll see a brief return of the previous year’s February droughts, and enjoy a much needed respite from the rain. Until then, however, it’s all we can do to increase flood measures and make sure our rain wear and roofs don’t sport any leaks. Flood measures are estimated to have saved almost 200,000 homes from floods this year, and hopefully this number will increase with new precautions built in 2013.