Thousands evacuated in U.K. as major flooding follows record drought – ‘We have not seen that sort of turnaround before’

Desdemona Despair

LONDON, 29 November 2012 (ClimateWire) – More than 1,100 homes across the United Kingdom have had to be evacuated after being flooded over the past week as persistent and at times torrential rains falling on already sodden ground have followed the country’s wettest summer on record.

Four wet weather fronts in a row in just 10 days in late November caused misery across Wales and the west of England as rivers burst their banks, and although the immediate outlook is for drier and more settled – albeit much colder – weather, many rivers are still rising as the land slowly drains.

“Eight months ago we were in drought, with many reservoirs, rivers and groundwater aquifers at very low levels. But after the very wet spring and summer, and with all this new rainfall, they are all now exceptionally high and the ground is soaked, so the water has nowhere else to go,” said a spokeswoman for the Environment Agency.

“The science tells us that it is just too early to say if this is a result of climate change,” she added. “But this is certainly the first year that it has gone so dramatically from drought to flood. We have not seen that sort of turnaround before. The records that we have do show that.”

Of the 1,038 flooded homes as of Tuesday, nearly 90 percent were in the southwest – particularly Devon – Wales and central England.

In the north Wales town of St. Asaph, about 500 residents were evacuated from their homes in the middle of Monday night, taking only what they could carry as the River Elwy rose to record levels and burst through flood defenses. Some used canoes to carry pets and light possessions to safety.

Locals said they had experienced nothing on the same scale since the mid-1960s. The Meteorological Office national weather service said the amount of rain that had fallen on the worst-affected areas in the past 10 days had, at up to 150 millimeters (5.9 inches), been roughly double the average for the month as a whole.

But although there had been a lot of rain in a relatively short period of time, the totals were not unprecedented. “The trouble is that we had a really wet summer, with not much respite since, so the rain has fallen on really saturated ground and this has led to flooding fairly quickly,” a Met Office spokesman said.

The Met Office said there was some preliminary evidence to show that the incidence of extreme rainfall in the United Kingdom had risen in recent years but added that it was not possible to say whether the increased risk of flooding now being experienced was a result of climate change.

After a series of major floods stretching back decades – one of the biggest in recent times having been in 1953 as a storm surge in the North Sea hit Belgium, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, killing about 2,200 people, of which more than 300 were in the United Kingdom – successive governments have added to national flood defenses.

But despite several and more localized floods in the United Kingdom – the most recent major one in 2007 having caused about £3 billion ($4.8 billion) worth of damage – the government admitted having cut back spending on many flood defense projects as it struggles with a faltering local economy and a financial crisis of confidence in the European Union as a whole.

For swamped U.K. residents in flooded areas, there are more woes ahead. A deal between the government and the insurance industry, under which insurers agreed to provide affordable insurance to high-flood-risk households while the government built flood defenses, is about to lapse, with no prompt replacement in sight.

According to the insurance industry, that could mean up to 200,000 high-risk households not having insurance coverage after the middle of next year. […]

Thousands Evacuated in U.K. as Major Flooding Follows Record Drought