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November 09, 2007
High tide on the East Coast
Images on the news of the great flood barriers at Rotterdam being closed for the first time should alert us to the reality of the threat of flooding from the storm surge tide currently threatening all the North Sea coasts and towns. Here in Britain it is, of course, made slightly worse by the failure of successive governments to invest in the sea walls and defences which, from Roman times, have defeneded the low lying East Coast. The excuse has been that it was "interfering with nature" and "damaging ecologically sensitive habitats". Not half as much as uncontrolled flooding will, or the damage which will be done in other areas when Gordon Brown rams through his new legislation to force local authorities to approve and accept the building of some three million houses in ecologically disasterous areas so he can flood the country with more of his immigrant mates and voters.
Mausi informs me that the Chief of Police on the East Friesian island of Borkum told a radio interview that he had been almost blown into the sea by the wind and the ferries cannot load as the cars would have to drive through two feet of water to board. That's quite a tide surge! In Hamburg the Fish Market is already ankle deep in water - something the denizens of that ancient Hanseatic city seem to think is amusing and "normal". That said, the storm has, apparently, been less severe than predicted, so perhaps they will get away with it this time round anyway.
Here in the west of England we are experiencing high winds and some rain, but then, we had our deluge earlier in the year and suffered the effects of a natural occurence and the lack of planning that this and other government's have driven through giving the OK to building houses and tarmacking areas without proper consideration to how this affects drainage and run-off. Likewise all along our East Coast, erosion is increasing year on year, ironically a knock-on of the work being done along the Dutch and Friesian coasts to stabilise their coastline, yet our government and their "Environment Agency" which seems to be entirely populated by Ecowarriors, refuse to allow the maintenance or rebuilding of any of the existing sea defences. The result is that in the last fifteen years we have lost enormous amounts of arrable land and a large number of buildings to the sea. Of course, they rabbit on about "global warming" and "climate change" being responsible, but considering that our Roman and medieval ancestors successfully reclaimed this land with fairly low tech systems and our immediate forebears held it for almost two thousand years, it doesn't take a genius to work out that the loss is directly attributable to ill-conceived and ill-implemented government policy.
It remains only to be seen how much we lose this time.
Posted by The Gray Monk at November 9, 2007 10:56 AM
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