European Union legislation has made it illegal for Britain to take the measures necessary to reduce the risk of flooding.
James Delingpole writes at Breitbart:
European Union legislation has made it illegal for Britain to take the measures necessary to reduce the risk of flooding.
James Delingpole writes at Breitbart:
They just add a couple more pumps and run them all night. This is a very interesting and difficult problem. The “natural” flood plain of rivers can be very large, and very fertile. In Egypt, the cycle is fairly regular, so they farm when the floods recede. Here in Missouri, where we just had about 12 inches of rain in 72 hours, the rivers are constrained by levees. Some years almost no floods, other years, lots of water, and it can come at any time of year. Also, any rain upstream has an impact. A couple years ago, the Corps of Engineers blew a levee to flood farm fields on the Missouri side of the Mississippi, to save a town on the Illinois side, whose levee was smaller. Hard choices. A lot of people suggest that land be set aside for flood mitigation, but it is such productive farm land, it seems wasteful. A worse problem is when they build in the flood plain, and hope the levees protect them. Then, when the levees break, as they inevitably will because no one wants to pay for the upkeep in the dry years (see New Orleans before Katrina), we get lots of pictures on the evening news, cries of woe is me!, and taxpayer bailout.
Interesting. So how do the Dutch overcome this problem?