"Prof Parsons' assessment is not theoretical." Really? So infilling the drains and building over the areas that formerly routinely flooded at times flood announcements on the radio were a regular event didn't happen then Dan?
New housing developments will be told to follow a design guide including water butts to catch water from drainpipes, permeable paving for rainwater and gardens filled with vegetation to soak up rain.
The master plan, big buckets and ditches to make up for the land and waterways that it used to collect on that they covered up. It'll cost millions to get it near to what it used to be naturally. In other news, the same people talking about this massive sea level rise, are scanning the sea bed to get images of Ravenserodd, lost to the sea in the 1300's.
Keeping the drains and rivers free of silt would be a great help, I remember when barmy drain in North Hull was dredged on a regular basis. Boats used to go up the river Hull to Beverley, it will only be a small boat that passes that way now.
They did help the old Queens Dock silt up a fair bit, with shovels etc. Maybe the revamp of Queens Gardens for the Maritime City bid could have been linked to the flood plan.
I think the jury's still out on river dredging. For every learned article you read about why it can cause flooding there's another saying it doesn't. For what it's worth my layman's view is that water should be kept upstream as much as possible. So reservoirs, natural flood plains, natural river features, tree planting etc
It depends on the reason for the flooding, be it rain, groundwater, tides, snow melt etc, but mechanical control via sluices and gates to a watercourse if optimal size is generally better than relying on silt as for one, it gives more options.
There was a bloke for the Environment Agency on RH a few years ago and someone called in and had a go at him, saying that these issues didn't exist when the River Hull was regularly dredged. He said the river had never been regularly dredged, as the traditional heavy traffic on the river had meant that no dredging had been required in the past.
Maybe, I'm no expert. But the more I read into it the more it seems clear to me that water management can't be looked at in isolation, it's intrinsically linked to the overall issue of land management, farming methods, changing climatic conditions, et al. Complicated.
There are flood alleviation measures included in the Queens Gardens revamp, no idea what they are, but they were mentioned in the HDM article I posted.
And there's another argument says rivers didn't silt up as much years ago because they didn't get as much topsoil blown into them as they do now because of lack of hedgerows and industrial scale fields.