Dealing with obstructed flow in a pipe is one thing, but when the blocked pipe is actually an entire river, things can get more than a little messy.
This was an unwelcome, biblically-proportioned reminder for the Somerset Levels back in 2012 and 2014, when the winter floods tested the very capacity of the river network. Excessive years of neglect led to a build up of sediment along the river bed. The conventional solution is obvious. If the river can’t hold all the water, make the river bigger: dredge the river bed to deepen it, or (where possible) widen the river. This kind of ongoing maintenance is an important barrier between Somerset as we know it today, and the marshy region it naturally and ceaselessly tries to return to.
Of course, by the time the floods came, it was already too late. The river had found it’s own overflow outlet – into peoples’ homes and gardens. And the roads that threaded them all together proved to be very willing to take on board the extra water, dissecting the area into unwilling islands.
If any doubts remain about the severity of these events, well… When the military is called in, it’s for more than just tea and biscuits. Hundreds of thousands of gallons of water were pumped away.
After the ordeal had mostly subsided through great effort and heartache, what was next? Clearly, preventing this from happening again.
In 2015, the Somerset Rivers Authority was established to dedicate some serious attention to this issue. Although people could now return as best they could to their daily lives, the threat was now as undeniable to authorities as it had been to some residents long before these unfortunate events came to a head. This will happen again tomorrow if nothing is done today.
3 years later, and we find ourselves in the tail-end of 2018. Estimations put dredging work taking place in early 2019.
One can’t help but wonder how different this story would have played out, had the right people decided to do this in a different order. I’m sure there’s some kind of moral to this about prevention vs cure.
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