What the papers say - about flooding (1)

Sunday Times 29 July 2007:

"... We have separated ourselves from the good, absorbent earth with an impermeable skin of concrete and tarmac that keeps water out of the aquifers, where we could use it, and hurries into drains that cnnot cope. We have re-engineered too many of our rivers. A natural river is slow and meandering between soft banks, not fast and straight between concrete ....."

... "To cap it all we have redefined flood plains as suburbs and sold a generation of housebuyers into hazard - hazard not only to themselves but to the rest of us who suffer the consequences of disrupted river systems and water with nowhere to go.

... "Planners under John Prescott seemed to have regarded the country as some kind of gigantic, inexhaustible sponge ... "

... "All this has happened despite the furrowed brows of the insuance industry ..."

... (from a lady in Oxford): "... She wanted to show how housing developments on flood plains had caused homes such as hers, in older streets, to end up inundated. ... she gestured to a new development of executive homes - none of them flooded. ... They didn't flood flood, so the housing minister might look at them and think "Great ... so you can build on flood plains!" but that's because they raised the level of the ground under the new houses - which meant our road flooded instead."