[HN Gopher] UK Weather: Flooding in London after heavy rain
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UK Weather: Flooding in London after heavy rain
Author : montalbano
Score : 53 points
Date : 2021-07-25 20:04 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bbc.co.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bbc.co.uk)
| mattlondon wrote:
| The first time this hit a week or two ago our patio "flooded" to
| about 4 or 5 cm deep in water alarmingly quickly. I grabbed a
| broom and jiggled around the drain to remove some
| leaves/twigs/mud and it cleared within 30 seconds. Today, no
| flood on our patio
|
| I wonder what the state of the drains are in most of London's
| streets considering the recent lack of basic services due to
| covid... This is not exactly new - its not like we don't get rain
| in London so I am surprised this is happening quite so frequently
|
| It would not surprise me to hear that basic street cleaning has
| been totally neglected for the past 18 months
| gerdesj wrote:
| Pop down to Screwfix or whatever and grab a set of drain rods
| (about PS30-50) and some manhole cover lifters (a few quid).
| Some long flat screwdrivers and a jemmy are also useful for
| lifting covers. Wear marigolds or marigolds under rigger gloves
| or those red coloured anti chemical gloves (watch out for
| holes.) Find out what is your responsibility to keep clear.
|
| The drains are fine for what they are designed to deal with
| which is weather as it was known many decades ago. All that
| stuff is designed to deal with a 1 in n year event eg a 1 in
| 100 year event or 1 in 500 or 1 in 1000 etc. The problem is
| that 1 in 100 year events are happening nearly annually these
| days. It's not quite as bad as that but not far off.
|
| Have a think about where you are in relation to flooding events
| because they will happen more often and with increasing
| severity where you are. If you have a mate who is a Civil
| Engineer or a Hydrologist, works in Flooding in the
| Environmental Agency or other useful type, instead of a banker
| or IT (I'm an ex Civ Eng and now work in IT - bloody useless)
| then buy them a beer or two and ask for advice.
|
| Keep your drains clear and your guttering too.
| hughrr wrote:
| My back garden gets flooded due to that all the time. The
| neighbour puts their food down the sink so it blocks up under
| the ground. You end up with peas in the grass the day after.
| The birds seem to make short work of it and the grass grows
| nicely so I'm not overly bothered.
|
| Streets however round us require wellies if it has been
| raining.
| bearbin wrote:
| Anecodtally, street cleaning hasn't changed that much over the
| pandemic, with the streets being just about as dirty as normal.
|
| That said, over a longer period the main roads near me have
| been getting quite badly deteriorated due to a lack of
| responsive maintenance (filling potholes, repair after utility
| works) and a lacking capital budget for resurfacing. TfL (who
| has responsibility for maintenance of main roads as well as the
| city's public transport) has had its overall budget reduced and
| as road maintenance is not an important issue politically or
| from a revenue-generation perspective that budget has been
| reduced to a low level.
|
| During the heavy rains today, I took a walk down the Camberwell
| New Road (a major road of 2-4 lanes) and the road was
| completely covered with water in several places, in others the
| water covered the bus lane, although in some stretches the
| water was clear.
|
| The sewers were not overwhelmed by the rain, evidenced by the
| drains that were flowing well and draining, however around 70%
| of the drains were blocked, 20% by leaves and dirt which I
| could clear off but 50% blocked internally by silt. A normal
| maintance schedule involves cleaning the silt out with a lorry-
| mounted vacuum cleaner several times a year, but this seems not
| to be done! One drain was blocked by silt after a burst water
| main about 3 years ago and has not been unblocked since,
| despite backing up every time it rained and being reported to
| TfL through their road defect site many times.
|
| However, not all flooding can be blamed on blocked drains, as
| some sections of the road are incorrectly pitched or have no
| drains at all and will always pond during rain. This would
| properly be remedied during heavy resurfacing, but that is also
| long overdue.
| scns wrote:
| How bad is it? In germany cars swam, several people died.
| m-i-l wrote:
| Second time in under 2 weeks[0]. I wonder how much of this is
| related to people having paved over their lawns and gardens.
|
| [0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-57811613 from 12 July
| montalbano wrote:
| Do you have any data suggesting there has been rapid paving of
| lawns and gardens since last year?
| makomk wrote:
| There's no reason why it would be caused merely by paving
| over of lawns and gardens in the last year - there's a lot of
| year-to-year variation in weather like this, and without
| sufficient advance planning and restrictions to enforce this,
| it's really easy to build in ways that get away without
| flooding for a few years or even decades until they don't.
| simonh wrote:
| That won't help, of course, but that doesn't change the fact
| these really are extreme weather events. They'd be causing
| damage and disruption anyway. I live in south east London. Last
| week my wife was driving home in a rain burst, she got stuck in
| traffic and took video of water gushing up out of a drain like
| a fountain. The road was near the bottom of a valley, and the
| pressure in the drain pipes running down the hill must have
| been enormous.
| objclxt wrote:
| > I wonder how much of this is related to people having paved
| over their lawns and gardens.
|
| Whilst that may well contribute, the main cause here was just
| the sheer volume of water in such a short space of time. I was
| right under the thunderstorm, we had about 80mm of rainfall in
| a couple of hours. That's the equivalent of two months of
| normal rainfall this time of year.
|
| When you get it coming in that quickly the water is going to
| run off everything.
| vondur wrote:
| In Southern California we've paved almost everything from the
| Ocean until 50 or 60 miles inland.
| montalbano wrote:
| This is the second time in a few weeks that there has been
| unprecedented surface water (rain, not river) induced flooding in
| many parts of London. An NYT article from 13th July:
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/13/world/europe/uk-london-fl...
| jfk13 wrote:
| At this rate, we'll have to stop calling it "unprecedented".
| simonh wrote:
| It's been an incredible year. Blizzards in Texas, burning heat
| in the northwest US, intense rain bursts in Europe and China.
| Then of course in the last few years extreme forest fires in
| Australia, the US and Brazil. Steadily worsening hurricanes.
|
| Climate scientists have been predicting more extreme weather
| for decades. This is just the early phase.
| firebaze wrote:
| If this is caused by climate change, we're probably doomed.
|
| Suppose there is at least a 50 year latency between human
| emissions and effect on weather, we're just starting to feel
| the effects of the past. I really hope this is just a
| statistical effect, but it feels like it isn't. Crossing
| Fingers.
| loopz wrote:
| The graph in the middle of this page shows for last 2k
| years.
|
| https://www.visualcapitalist.com/global-temperature-
| graph-18...
|
| It's not like we didn't get any warnings or didn't see it
| coming.
| walterbell wrote:
| If drones can encourage rain, could they be used to delay rain or
| spread it out over a longer time?
| https://interestingengineering.com/the-uae-is-using-drones-t...
|
| _> rain-controlling drones engineered by the University of
| Reading. The drones don 't create rain themselves but help to
| jump-start rain production via cloud seeding. They "zap" the
| clouds with an electric charge, subsequently charging the
| droplets inside. Since the beginning of 2021, the National Center
| of Meteorology (NCM) has conducted 126 instances of cloud
| seeding._
| simonh wrote:
| I think the idea is to seed rain to get moisture out of the air
| mass before it builds up too much, or before it hits population
| centres.
| [deleted]
| binbag wrote:
| I look forward to Westminster taking climate change more
| seriously now...
| atc wrote:
| How do we know these weather patterns are the product of
| climate change?
| illwrks wrote:
| Haven't they all fecked off down to Cornwall until September...
| [deleted]
| bArray wrote:
| > I look forward to Westminster taking climate change more
| seriously now...
|
| Despite talk of the environment in the recent G7 meeting, I
| suspect it's going to take a backseat to economic recovery. You
| have the ongoing issues from Brexit and the fact that the
| government (and their opposition) have an impossible standard
| for COVID vaccine success.
|
| Also I'd be interested to hear what you want to see Westminster
| do. I've heard a lot of ideas being thrown around, but I remain
| sceptical.
| anonymousiam wrote:
| Remarkable how fast the climate can change:
| https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-17373803
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(page generated 2021-07-25 23:00 UTC)