UK Weather: Flooding in London after heavy rain

Pop down to Screwfix or whatever and grab a set of drain rods (about £30-50) 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.

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.

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.

Very mildly related: I recently found this youtuber whos thing is walking around in heavy rain and unclogging street drains. Neat.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZIBqdpR4C_U

Here in Los Angeles, so many people were required to work from home that we stopped street sweeping since street parking was configured for a good portion going to work elsewhere. I'm sure a ton of our drains are full of pine straw and such and with a good rain, we'd be fucked. Not sure if anyone is culpable. It's the reality of a shutdown.

Not in London, but I can confirm that the only time drains are cleared around here is when someone bothers to complain to the Council. Then there's usually a delay because the blockages are causing widespread street flooding and the Council can't cope. As for actual street cleaning, I can't remember the last time...

Perhaps we should start asking the Dutch how they do it:

https://www.thoughtco.com/polders-and-dikes-of-the-netherlan...

Thames Barrier should be enough at least till 2030.

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.

At this rate, we'll have to stop calling it "unprecedented".

Do you have any data suggesting there has been rapid paving of lawns and gardens since last year?

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.

> 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.

In Southern California we’ve paved almost everything from the Ocean until 50 or 60 miles inland.

Pavement definitely soaks up less water than a lawn but note that the soil in London is rich in clay so it doesn’t drain quickly. I would expect there are plenty of waterlogged fields at the moment, though runoff from paved land surely doesn’t help.

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.

> 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.

Haven't they all fecked off down to Cornwall until September...

You'll keep looking for a while... Treasury coffers are empty after a year of covid subsidies, borrowing is out of control, and tax intakes will be meager for a while.

They'll simply continue pushing on the electric-car-switch plan - since it costs nothing.

Even if the green party got in it wouldn't make much difference because they have all been pedaling the lie that we don't need to change our lifestyles.

Or maybe just don't do massive development projects on historical floodplains.

https://www.queenelizabetholympicpark.co.uk/~/media/lldc/loc...

Bad talking points harm the climate change arguments. The damage to the movement of exaggerating during the Inconvenient Truth era will never be repaired because the movement was so focused in trying to make people panic and act that we're now past the deadlines they were feigning panic about and these deadlines now become ammunition for the other side.

I don’t think many people will die (if anyone). The video in the article had a few people who either abandoned their cars or foolishly drove them deeper on flooded roads. The flooded underground stations look scary. I just don’t know how good we are about draining stations/tunnels/preventing flooding there (once upon a time, there were floodgates at the doors to the platform at stations near tunnels under the Thames but I don’t think they are operational at all.)

The flooding is less bad than flooding in Germany (something like 10-00 dead? Many evacuated or disrupted) and much less bad than in zhengzhou (likely over 10k but obviously government trying to cover it up.)

Is it actually remarkable? We had hosepipe bans at various times decades ago and hot sunny weather is frequently followed by thunderstorms. There has always been between years with some being hotter or wetter or colder or snowier or drier. I don’t think there is much of a trend to be observed by one day of 2021 and a portion of the weather of 2012.

Maybe it is still remarkable but it is also surely typical.