At last! MPs are beginning to get the message about HS2. According to yesterday’s Observer:
I’m coming to like the idea of beavers. And no, I don’t mean those, I mean the animated furry kind. Oh maybe not that either … the animals what build dams in rivers, m’lud.
I used not to think much of these animals, but research seems to be showing that they really do have a beneficial effect on water management, otherwise known as flood control.
And beavers are back on the agenda (well, maybe) because a large part of southern England is under water thanks to a record breaking deluge over the last 2-3 months. December and January rainfall has been the heaviest in England and Wales since records began 240 years ago — and it looks as if February is about to join them.
According to New Scientist the rains have been exacerbated by the weather in Indonesia and the tropical west Pacific — no I don’t get that either but then I’m not a meteorologist. But regardless, we’ve had several oceans of rain recently and consequently there is much flooding in southern England.
There is an argument going on about whether rivers were dredged sufficiently, and whether if they were it would have made any difference. On the one side we appear to have the UK government who say rivers must be dredged more and they’ll pay — mainly because they’re trying to appease agribusiness. On the other hand every hydrologist being quoted is saying dredging would, at best, have made no difference and would likely have made things worse.
“Dredging of river channels does not prevent flooding during extreme river flows … The concept of dredging to prevent extreme flooding is equivalent to trying to squeeze the volume of water held by a floodplain within the volume of water held in the river channel. Since the floodplain volume is usually many times larger than the channel volume, the concept becomes a major engineering project and a major environmental change.”
He then says:
Is that not bleeding obvious? A river’s capacity is tiny by comparison to the catchment from which it draws its water. You can increase the flow of a river by dredging, but that is likely to cause faster and more dangerous floods downstream when the water hits the nearest urban bridge … If you cut it off from its floodplain by turning it into a deep trench, you might raise its capacity from, say, 2% of the water moving through the catchment to 4%. You will have solved nothing while creating a host of new problems.
Among these problems, the Environment Agency points out, are:
1. Massive expense. Once you have started dredging, “it must be repeated after every extreme flood, as the river silts up again”.
2. More dangerous rivers: “Removing river bank vegetation such as trees and shrubs decreases bank stability and increases erosion and siltation.”
3. The destabilisation of bridges, weirs, culverts and river walls, whose foundations are undermined by deepening the channel: “If the river channels are dredged and structures are not realigned, ‘Pinch Points’ at structures would occur. This would increase the risk of flooding at the structure.” That means more expense and more danger.
4. Destruction of the natural world: “Removing gravel from river beds by dredging leads to the loss of spawning grounds for fish, and can cause loss of some species. Removing river bank soils disturbs the habitat of river bank fauna such as otters and water voles.”
Yep, that’s right: dredging is a tool for improving navigation not land drainage. If you want to prevent flooding you need to do things like:
• More trees and bogs in the uplands — reconnecting rivers with their floodplains in places where it is safe to flood …
• Making those floodplains rougher by planting trees and other deep vegetation to help hold back the water — lowering the banks and de-canalising the upper reaches, allowing rivers once more to create meanders and braids and oxbow lakes. These trap the load they carry and sap much of their destructive energy.
So how should all this be done?
Well one answer appears to be beavers!
Beaver are considered to be a ‘key-stone’ species because they have the ability to create and maintain wetlands by building dams and digging ditches. They also create coppice, selectively felled areas of woodland. In doing this they provide essential habitat for many other species of plant and animal. Wetland areas and coppice must currently be maintained artificially, at significant cost to the public. Beaver damming activity has also been observed to filter pollutants out of the water, leaving streams cleaner.
Wetlands are … fragile ecosystems, but they can also act as a flood defence and could protect homes across the country. After heavy rainfall, wetland areas and flood plains act as a sponge, holding excess water and releasing it slowly, preventing sudden rises in water level and flash floods …
Beavers have been reintroduced across Europe, and have not caused any serious ecological problems. Reintroductions have been extremely successful as long as the population density is low enough that the beavers do not come into conflict with human activity.
There’s a fuller report, by Natural England and People’s Trust for Endangered Species, on reintroducing beavers to England here.
Sure, beavers likely aren’t going to do a lot of good actually on the Somerset Levels. But they will help if they are present on the uplands which drain into the Levels. One of the keys seems to be the need to manage water flow much higher up the valleys than the actual areas currently being flooded.
But of course that’s counter-intuitive both to the affected residents and to politicians. And of course neither trusts the experts who they employ. If you’re not going to listen to experts — insisting instead on a DIY fuck-up — then don’t waste money employing them.
So the bottom line is we need to reintroduce beavers.
What a great idea!
Meanwhile I’ll leave you with George Monbiot’s final salvo:
Cameron’s dredge pledge is like the badger cull. It is useless. It is counter-productive. But it keeps the farmers happy and allows the government to be seen to be doing something: something decisive and muscular and visible. And that, in these dismal times, appears to be all that counts.
As regular readers will know, transforming the NHS so that it can provide excellent healthcare to people in the UK at an affordable cost is something which has exercised my mind for a long time (see, for example, here and here). And I am involved, at a local level, in trying to help unlock this.
Now don’t get me wrong. Many parts of the NHS are excellent. In an emergency they generally work brilliantly, at least in the short-term. And many of the doctors and nurses care deeply about looking after the patients.
And that is despite the fact that the NHS should already have shed-loads of money to do everything we would want it to do if it used it wisely.
The other day I had to visit a local private hospital, and the contrast with the NHS was almost as stark as it has always been. No, it wasn’t perfect. For a start it was far too hot, but it was clean and looked professionally welcoming. Yes, there were plenty of staff around, and they all appeared to be doing something with a purpose. You had a degree of confidence that everyone knew what they were doing and why and that they cared about their patients.
This is more what the NHS should be like. But how to get there?
I keep thinking about this and here’s my three step plan for the paradigm shift which the NHS requires, from top to bottom.
Step 1. Get someone at the top who can successfully run a large, quality, profitable corporation and who is able and willing to tell the politicians to butt out and stay out. Someone like Richard Branson, or perhaps Alan Sugar (no, I don’t care that you dislike them; they’re good at what they do). Someone who will have a vision of how the organisation should be and will implement it regardless of push-back from any level — if you aren’t going to do the job, get out.
Step 2. Tackle the appalling level of waste. This includes finding efficiencies — improved ways of doing things — at all levels. And that means everything from reducing bloated layers of managers and administrators, through cupboards full of medical supplies which have to be thrown out because they go out of date while other departments can’t order the very same thing, to turning down the heating.
Yes, really! Turn the heating down! NHS hospitals, clinics and offices are always far too hot; when people who are usually cold tell me it’s too hot then you really are wasting money! Just this one thing could save the NHS millions.
And while you’re saving money, fix the buildings: even if you can’t build new hospitals (because of time, money or space) you can at least make the ones you have into a habitable environment. Fix the leaks etc. Stop the draughts. Buy some paint. Because they will save you even more money in the long run.
Do those two things and you will start to see a culture change. But to complete the paradigm shift you need to do something just as fundamental the the outlook and attitude of all the staff — from the most world renowned consultant surgeon to the lowest lavatory cleaner. So that means …
Step 3. Everyone needs to take on board four basic beliefs and habits:
No, I don’t pretend it will be easy. That’s why you need the right person, with the right attitude, at the top. Without that one person it will never work because the politicians will keep meddling and the all the vested interests will see the top as weak and keep playing their own games. And then the patient (remember him/her?) is forgotten.
Yes, initially there will be a lot of scepticism and probably a morale hit. But as time goes on, as it begins to work and people start to buy-in, morale will increase and you’ll win lots of crusaders.
But it will take time. I went through this in a multi-national corporation in the 1990s and it took the best part of a decade, lots of head-banging, a lot of people being retrained and several rounds of redundancies for those who couldn’t or wouldn’t adjust. So I’ve seen it done; I was looking up from the bottom wondering WTF was happening; after a couple of years the penny dropped and I too changed. I know it can be done.
So David Cameron and Jeremy Hunt, do you have the balls to do this?
I’m not holding my breath.
____________________
** This also applies to some GP surgeries although most are better as they are small stand-alone businesses which have to keep afloat.
If I believe what I read in (some parts of) the press the authorities seems to be unreasonably waging war on London’s prostitutes, especially in Soho. And no doubt this is going on elsewhere in the UK too.
There was an interesting, and rather worrying, article in yesterday’s Observer under the banner:
FFS what sort of madman can even start to think that new trees are equivalent to ancient woodland. Just for a start the biodiversity is completely different.
There was an interesting article by Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, in yesterday’s Daily Telegraph in which he asks if “Europe” is going to turn out to be one of those things which we’re always told are necessary but turn out not to be.
Aside from the obvious (well who’d have guessed he was about to die?) here are a few thoughts on the passing of Nelson Mandela.
Let us remember that, in today’s values, Nelson Mandela was first a terrorist leader, and (whether rightly or not) he was convicted of such.
Had he lived almost anywhere but South Africa he would have been locked up for life without any prospect of a get out of jail free card. As, in fact, he was!
That he did get out of jail is largely down to the dysfunctionality and instability of South Africa at that time.
Mandela made the most of the opportunity and turned it to good, which was no mean achievement!
Consequently I suspect that until now South Africa has held together as well as it has because of his very presence. He may no longer have had any formal power, but his influence would, I’m sure, have been very real. And who knows what mafia-esque machinery turned behind the scenes?
I sincerely hope South Africa continues to hold together, return to stability and becomes a respected African nation again. However I fear that it won’t.
There seems to be a big danger that the factional infighting and feuds, which are still there, will surface in what is an inevitable power vacuum. And that this will lead to a descent into anarchy and civil war, if not an outright tribal bloodbath — black vs white, Xhosa vs Zulu etc. Which is much the route trodden by their neighbour Zimbabwe, amongst others.
I hope I’m wrong. The South Africans have invested too much in getting this far to even contemplate such horrors.
North-West London NHS last year consulted on proposals to rationalise the delivery of A&E services in the hospitals in its area. One element of this is the closure of A&E at Ealing Hospital, close to where I live. This is unlikely to happen for at least three and probably five years.
Watching BBC Breakfast yesterday (22 October) I spotted my first Remembrance Day poppy if the year. It was being worn by some female, the head of one of our plethora of regulators, who was being given an easy ride of an interview.
This is obscenely early, given that Remembrance Day (11 November) isn’t for another three weeks.
But then, as I’ve said before, I sometimes think I’m the only person in the country who finds everything about Remembrance Day sick and obscene. I’m with novelist Evelyn Waugh who in his youthful diaries described Remembrance Day as
… a disgusting idea of artificial nonsense and sentimentality. If people have lost sons and fathers, they should think of them whenever the grass is green or Shaftesbury Avenue brightly lighted, not for two minutes on the anniversary of a disgraceful day of national hysteria.
