It was a Labour peer who decided to stop dredging the rivers to save £4.5m a year and instead spend £31m on a bird sanctuary, if they'd carried on dredging the rivers, they wouldn't have flooded.
The key to the Somerset Levels lies in its rivers, kept dredged to provide all that water pumped off the land with an escape route down to the sea. From the moment the Environment Agency took over, however, it began to neglect its responsibility for keeping those rivers clear. From 2000 onwards, under the leadership of a Labour peeress, Baroness Young of Old Scone, this reluctance to dredge and to maintain the pumping stations became a deliberate ideology, designed to give priority to the interests of ‘habitat’ and ‘biodiversity’ over those of protecting the Levels as farmland. Lady Young is famously said to have remarked that she wanted to see ‘a limpet mine attached to every pumping station’. http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/leading-article/9131442/floods-of-incompetence/
Jim'll sort it........ [video=youtube;5qRJIBtbc2c]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qRJIBtbc2c[/video]
The thing is that the Levels (their rivers, that is - Parrett, Axe and Brue) can only drain into the Severn Estuary twice a day, at low tide. Massive rainfall, together with strong south-west winds and exceptional high tides, militates against sufficient outflow. Dredging would only make a very slight difference.
As far as I understand it, the flooding has got progressively worse since they stopped the dredging. I bet they start dredging again.
They will start dredging again, but no-one seems to know how successfully. Desperate people are demanding it, and it's politically necessary 'to be seen to be doing something'.......
