Sir, – The recent flooding in Dublin is a warning that the decades’-long trend for over-paving urban areas must be stopped and reversed. Sealed surfaces such as cobble-lock, asphalt and concrete prevent water soaking into the ground. This increases the intensity of run-off after heavy rainfall thus overwhelming our drainage systems.
Why are we overpaving? It is due to a combination of factors. One is that insurance companies charge less for cars parked off the street. A second is that car owners are being harassed by city parking permit requirements. Third, there are more cars per household and not enough roadside to park them along. Fourth and perhaps saddest, people don’t feel they have the time for or interest in tending gardens on the street-side of their homes. Paving a garden is not viewed as a loss.
Politicians and policy-makers might be tempted to look at large-scale engineering solutions. They would be wrong. The best policy is to use a combination of legal, planning and market mechanisms to discourage over-paving. The insurance industry needs to stop discounting cars parked off the street and it needs to discount houses with unpaved front gardens. This is in its interest as the industry will reduce its future pay-outs due to flooding.
Municipalities must restrict applications to pave gardens; a city-regional plan is needed to gradually make our cities areas more permeable. The long-term advantage is that flooding will be less intense and less frequent. The immediate advantages are that air quality and the visual appeal of urban areas will improve. Vegetation will increase shade, cool the air and reduce the heat-island effect in summer time.
It is imperative that policy- makers avoid large-scale engineering solutions as it is engineering-thinking that has led us into this problem in the first place. – Yours, etc,
Sir, – I spent Monday evening bailing water out of the basement of a terraced house in Dublin’s city centre. All of the houses on the square had about a foot of water swilling around at the lowest level with the inevitable mayhem that follows.
This is not the first time this has happened. The occupants confirmed that the water level rose at such an alarming rate around 7.30pm there was insufficient time for the complete evacuation of beds, electrical goods and carpets. It wasn’t possible to contact Dublin City Council’s emergency telephone number, the Dublin Fire Brigade or the ESB emergency telephone number – a worrying state of affairs.
I accept that having the equivalent of one month’s rainfall in one day is an exception; a situation further aggravated by a high tide. I also accept that the damage to people’s homes cannot possibly be as devastating as the loss of life of the garda who was swept away by flood waters while trying to divert traffic away from a bridge near Blessington.
However, in these times of satellite weather forecasting and digital communications, why is it not possible to plan for these situations?
In the more vulnerable areas, people could be provided with sandbags in advance; and more importantly, offered guidance on what to do with the electricity and gas supply when the water begins to rise above socket outlets.
Having splashed home on foot on Monday evening, in water that was at times above my ankles both on and off the pavements and torrenting over (not into) drainage outlets, it struck me that our drainage system is either completely inadequate or totally over-burdened – or both.
What with Áras revelations, bail-outs, bailiffs and daily economic melt- downs, it surely feels that “the world is in a state of chassis”! – Yours, etc,
Sir, – I want to commend Dublin Bus, which managed to get people home on Monday night despite atrocious conditions.
I was a passenger on the 123, and the unflappable driver – despite impassable flooding, diversions, traffic gridlock and anxious commuters – managed to maintain his equanimity, getting us as near our homes as was possible.
A big thank you! – Yours, etc,
A chara, – On Monday evening in Dublin, and especially in Clondalkin, our roads are flooded and the drains don’t work. Why can’t the Government put in place a nationwide plan to fix up the drainage system. This would be a huge boost to all local economies and create many hundreds of jobs. – Is mise,
Sir, – My sympathies to those who are bereaved, and those suffering flood damage. However, considering the deluge on Monday on the east coast, I would like to express thanks through the auspices of your excellent paper to all those in the public services who worked together to keep us all as dry in our homes as we were and getting about as well as we did.
That there was no greater impact is due to the planning and attention to detail – and good drains. Well done to all concerned, take a bow. – Yours, etc,
Sir, – Floods have become part of everyday life in developing countries. Maybe now we will think twice before we turn on our half- empty washing machines. – Yours, etc,
Sir, – The downpours experienced in our capital city on Monday were extreme by anyone’s standard. According to Met Éireann, Dublin experienced October’s average monthly rainfall (65mm) in just one-day (82mm).
Surely now it’s time to start asking the hard question. Are these extreme weather events linked to climate change? Up until recently the word with regard to extreme weather has been that you could never blame one individual event on climate change.
However, this position has been changing of late, as more sophisticated computer climate models predict that short duration, extreme events will become more frequent and that we will have wetter winters and drier summers in Ireland. In 2007 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in its fourth assessment on climate change said it is “very likely that hot extremes, heatwaves and heavy rainfall will become more frequent”.
But now there is also hard data supporting these climate models. In 2010 the EPA published Extreme Weather, Climate and Natural Disasters in Ireland, 2010. The report highlighted the empirical data that showed there has been approximately a 10 per cent increase in annual rainfall over parts of Ireland since the 1970s and that there has also been an increase in extreme rainfall events.
In February this year, Nature magazine published an article titled “Increased flood risk linked to global warming”. The article referenced two papers published by the magazine that month directly linking rising greenhouse gas levels with a growing intensity of rain and snow in the northern hemisphere and a doubling of flood risk in the United Kingdom.
The significance of linking these extreme weather events with climate change should be important for all of us. Yet this linkage receives little attention by media and policy-makers.
We only need to cast our memories back two years to November 2009, when Ireland experienced one of its worst flooding events on record. In July 2008, severe flooding was experienced in the Newcastle West area of Co Limerick; and in August of the same year, several areas in the east of the country experienced significant flooding. All of this happened on top of three very wet consecutive summers from 2007 to 2009.
The worrying implications of more frequent, more extreme weather events, are that what we have considered to be a once in 100 year weather event up to now, may in fact be starting to happen more often.
If this is the case, and science would suggest it is, then Monday’s weather should be a warning to us all. – Yours, etc,
Sir, – After the deluge? A flood tribunal! – Yours, etc,