There are times when you just have to shake your head in disbelief at the stupidity of the various forms of governing authorities. The Observer reports today that the flood warning sirens (similar to WWII air raid warning sirens) on the North Norfolk coast are to be abolished. Apparently the Environment Agency and the Police claim that sirens may cause "confusion and panic". I ask you.Instead, in the event of severe floods, the Police will go door to door and wake people up. Bearing in mind that there are only three policemen covering the area from Wells to North Walsham at night (if I remember correctly) you can see the problem. In addition, housing is scattered. Yes, there are lots of small villages, but there are also individual houses dotted around the countryside within a mile of the coast. They say they can use phones to warn people. But what about the 255 of houses along the North Norfolk coast which are second homes or holiday cottages? And mobile phone coverage in some areas is patchy at best if you are on O2 or T-Mobile.
Norman Lamb, North Norfolk's Liberal Democrat MP, said: "It is an extremely emotional subject in Norfolk because of those that lost their lives in 1953. The decision to stop using sirens comes at a time when the threat [of flooding] is very clearly increasing. Sea levels are rising. There is a greater risk of storms because of global warming. At the same time sea defences are being downgraded. Police say they will knock door-to-door in the event of a threat. But we have remote communities dotted along the coast. There is no way you could deploy a police force along that coastline at the same time in the dead of night and in a raging storm."
So at a time of increased risk of floods, the authorities make a decision which can only add to the risk of lives being lost. People still remember what happened in the floods of 1953, when 80 people were killed in North Norfolk. Good luck to all those who are now campaigning for this decision to be reversed.
23 comments:
I think the number of police is one car for West North Norfolk (Wells, Fakenham and Sheringham) and another for the Eastern part (Cromer, Bacton Gas terminal, North Walsham and Mundesley), so it is two police cars, four officers, with the Eastern car being on call to Bacton gas terminal as a priority.
That was the case when I was a North Norfolk councillor.
I agree with your sentiment though and those of Norman Lamb who is a worthy advocate for the people whose livelihoods and homes are at threat from coastal erosion and flooding.
The Environment Agency and other bodies say forecasting has become a lot more sophisticated than it was in 1953, which means they should be able to predict flooding more than 24 hours in advance.
This was the case during the storm surges a couple of Octobers back. The weather system which causes flooding - northerly/north-easterly wind, spring tide and low air pressure - was spotted 36hrs or more before it arrived.
Sirens date back to the days when it would have talken a policeman a fortnight or more to cycle from King's Lynn to Huntstanton knocking on every door en route.
Advanced warning is what
will save lives next time there's a repeat of 1953.
Gordon Bennett, I'm glad I don't live near Brancaster anymore.
Are these people quite mad?
Actually if the fens were to flood it would vastly improve things.
@ Northern Coast
Well done. Sucking up to the boss works 9/10.
Meanwhile expect sever storms with freezing winds as all fringe nulab.gov.uk initiatives get shelved.
The UK is broke!
This is a strange decision to say the least. As a local resident in the town where some of the worst damage was done in '53, I can assure the EA that there is no confusion whatsoever as to what that sound is.
What do they think, that we all go down into the basement with tin cans and duct tape to wait for the radioactive fallout to subside?
Admittedly, last time there was a scare, the Police had evacuated people to the local school and closed all roads at risk, but that assumes the infalability of the forecasters.
I hope Norman Lamb can enlist help from Henry Bellingham and apply pressure to get this stopped.
Actually I think it's a good move Iain. With text alerts, phone alerts, email, TV and radio I think the need for sirens is a bit dated.
Lifeboat crews have used pagers for years now and they manage quite well for alerts.balize
We clearly need more Flood Siren Stress Counselling Outreach Co-ordinating Facilitators.
Makes one despair. What else can one do but turn one's face to the wall?
Quite what use Henry Bellingham would be is open to question as his constituency is a beneficiary of North Norfolk's erosion. Flooding, although a problem in Kings Lynn, is not a problem for the great part of the North West Norfolk constituency.
The problem North Norfolk has is that by the government allowing the Dutch to dredge the Norfolk coastline in order to use this to defend their shoreline (irony is lost on this government), and whilst millions of pounds is received by the government from the Dutch for this activity, the same UK government says there are insufficient funds to protect the North Norfolk coast ??? The government's latest plan is the abandonment of the North Norfolk coast between Cromer all the way round to North of Great Yarmouth.
The government seem to ignore the fact that if the sea was to break through just a few miles inland from Happisburgh/Cart Gap this would sea sea water flooding the Broads, and ruining this unique fresh water habitat, but would also lead to flooding in central Norfolk, possibly Norwich (which suffered badly from floods in the past) and essentially making parts of central Norfolk pretty unviable in the long term.
The government's short sightedness in these matters is stunning.
Luckily, I live on something of a hill !
As for the comments from Red Ken, he ignored your comments Iain about mobile phone reception.
Most networks are very VERY poor on the coast whilst gret big chunks of the North Norfolk coast cannot even pick up Five Live on MW or Radio Norfolk, so the idea of picking up text alerts is a joke. There are also villages in Norfolk that do not have Broadband yet.
But, iain, people object to noise. Church Bells are being stopped from ringing! School Music Teachers are advised to wear ear muffs. Brass bands are banned from street concerts.It is a wonder that football crowds are allowed to make so much noise! (Early days though!)
WHAT have the local Council, County Council and Members of Parliament said about this nonsense?
This country, under this administration has become a basket case. Human Rights = Criminals Rights. Health and Safety is the Wimps Charter. Compensation for a scratch!
Once we were a Nation of strong men and women. We have now been reduced to couldn't care less society.
God help us when the Health and Safety Executive get stuck into our armed services!
Don't say they wont. They got stuck into the Police!
The police couldn't or wouldn't protect Tony Martin after dozens of break-ins, and told him so, so why would you suppose they'd care about going door to door to wake up people in advance of a storm ?
"Flooding, although a problem in Kings Lynn, is not a problem for the great part of the North West Norfolk constituency..."
NW Norfolk includes Hunstanton, Heacham and Snettisham; which saw scores of lives lost in 1953.
It also includes Titchwell, where the RSPB is having to re-align defences because of the loss of the beach and increasingly frequent tidal surges.
There were 50 or more delegates from all kinds of organisations at a flood exercise at Hunstanton in October, which went through how the various warnings and evacuation notices would operate.
"The government's latest plan is the abandonment of the North Norfolk coast between Cromer all the way round to North of Great Yarmouth."
When the Minister came to Norfolk in the autumn, he pledged support for holding the line for the next 50 years. They don't think they'll be able to guarantee it after that because of the speed of climate change and its affects on weather, tides etc.
Saturday, 31st January, 1953, was a typical winter Saturday afternoon: Norwich scraped a one-all draw against Coventry.
What really went wrong that evening was the lack of warning. As far as I know, there was no storm alert on the radio: there was no national system of warning. Of course, very few had televisions: Tacolneston didn't start transmitting until 1956. Anyway, the electricity went early on.
When the storm hit, first at Spurn Head and then the Wash, one of the first things to go were telephone wires.
As I (dimly) recall, in Wells the police had the cinema (in Theatre Road) shut down some time before 9 pm. The projection stopped (not unknown, so greeted with the customary widespread groans); and the manager came on the apron stage: "The Police say the tide is over the sea wall, and you should all go home."
Soon after, I was paddling through Church Plain. The water was already a foot or so deep in front of the Church Hall. In some of the houses in the dip at the bottom of High Street it was much deeper. Peter Sillitoe (from whom I later bought my first Lambretta -- an Ld150, YPW 636) swam into the house to rescue his sister Una's dolls.
Don Rudd's aerial photograph of Wells, taken next day, showed that the sea had returned to its medieval limits, washing the north wall of the churchyard.
That's why, all my childhood, the siren was tested every Monday morning.
I therefore see both sides of this debate.
We now have the Storm Tide Forecasting Service. Meteorology has improved immeasurably -- though, in 1953, the first reports of that depression moving in were three days earlier.
On the other hand, a round hundred Norfolk people died that night (out of a UK total of 307) and are still remembered. Fifteen of those deaths were in King's Lynn, another 65 on the coast between Lynn and Hunstanton.
Since 1953 the south-east of England has sunk by 5-6 cm: not greatly significant in itself, but add in the effects of global warming. Now factor in a deep depression: at 960mb, the sea-level is increased by half-a-metre. A northerly gale intensifies the effect, as it funnels the water down the North Sea: that can add another couple of metres. In 1953, the total surge was measured at three metres (+/- the odd cm), on top of (I think) one of the highest spring tides of the year.
Mobile phones, tv and radio probably represent the best ways of spreading an alarm in our society, far better than a siren.
The last big one, before 1953, was 250 years previous. The next one, whenever, will differ in another respect: East Anglia, effectively an armed camp in 1953, has been demilitarised. Half the casualties at Hunstanton were US servicemen, rousted out to cope. National Servicemen were rushed in to help the clean-up (some were actually of real use).
Oh, and afterwards the UK was in receipt of overseas food aid. I recall those Californian raisins -- but especially the coffee, courtesy of Haile Selasie. Yes: we had relief aid from Ethiopia.
And the "word verification" very appropriately is "swede".
Considering the banning of conkers - in case someone gets hurt (gasp!) - the removal of an alarm system that might save a life (or several) seems bizarre and equally disproportionate.
@ Malcolm Redfellow
Excellent commentary.
I think that if a major breach occurs again, the damage and casualty levels may well be comparable. The Environment Agency has shown itself to be all too easily 'surprised', and Labour Ministers have never been prepared to shoulder blame or any form of responsibility, nor to think ahead.
And perhaps we should remember that North Kent was also very badly affected by the floods in 1953 and 1979, the Isle of Sheppey being particularly hard hit and cut off from the mainland for a time. Canvey Island in Essex was largely under water, too.
There are some interesting pitcures here: http://www.topfoto.co.uk/gallery/floods/default.html
2 February seems like a good day to check that the boat is in good order.
Perhaps this area doesn't return a Labour MP by any chance ?
Iain, the reason decisions like this are made is because thhe people who make them are de-educated morons. They are also self-loathing, collectivist control freaks who want people to stay indoors unless the Fuzz tell them/give permission to move. Oh, and tearing down something old that works is their primary M.O.
Man in a Shed @ 10:18 AM:
We blogged that one here, on the death of Bertie Hazell. Then, as some are doing here, fifth-form debaters [Cf: Roger Thornhill @ 10:28] tried to indulge in infantile partisan sniping. There is a modest attempt (though widely applauded) to trace the radical tradition of North Norfolk on my own site. Remember: they "do different" in Norfolk.
Since it was substantially the lower orders who died across South East England and the Low Countries, I can assure you that the 1953 Floods did nothing to endear Right-on! politicians to the populace. Note, too, that the sirens were never extended out-of-town (and we are talking some real acreage here): those rustics didn't deserve a warning, did they?
Recent elections suggest that Tories are not a shoo-in across Norfolk, especially its northern divisions. As for Henry Bellingham, two of the more interesting facts about him are that he is the scion of Williamites and County Louth landlords, and represents a Trivial Pursuits link between Field Marshall Lord Alanbrooke and that great (non)democrat, the first Viscount Brookeborough.
The fifth Bellingham baronet (a title to which Old Etonian Henry is in line) was another of those weird links: a subaltern in the Boer War, a DSO in the First War (rose eventually to be a Brigadier-General), a political officer in the embassy in Guatamala, a Squadron-Leader in the RAF Volunteer Reserve, the last ever Lord-Lieutenant of Louth, and for eleven years a Senator in the Free State (alongside WB Yeats for some of that time).
Malcolm Redfellow, your sniffy jibe says much more about you and nothing about me, e.g. "partisan" and "fifth form".
You don't bother to reply to my point but I suspect you missed it anyway.
Roger Thornhill @ 12:52 PM:
Some apology may be due: the trouble with deep, deep irony is it can be mistaken for bathetic ignorance.
As for being "partisan", that is covered by your assumption that a recommendation of the Norfolk County Council Fire and Community Protection Review Panel (of 16 January 2007) was a wilful and malign diktat from Whitehall. Norfolk CC, you may have noticed, is Conservative-controlled. The sirens are a delegated responsibility.
This time the word verification is "toryode". Strangely oxymoronic.
The real story of the sea surge flooding of 2007
www.weva.org.uk
The EA flood warning system failed us by crashing, not updating to flood warning because it was unable to gauge wave height which flooded us and by crying wolf so many times previously when the sea was seen to be smooth as a mill pond.
We at Walcott trust our experienced flood wardens, on site, eye witnessing conditions and able to organise evacuation because they know the area like the back of their hands.
What we actually got was a multi agency control who could not enter the control room because it was occupied. Could not give full instructions to other emergency controls who had no IT or mobile cover.
Silver control at North Walsham stood down so Walcott had no cover during the time the sea surge hit us. Even so, they refused to sound the sirens.
18 months later, the same people are stilll in charge, the police refuse to sound the sirens against the will of the local population and the buoy the EA promised would monitor the wave height has laid wrecked on the beach after breaking its moorings.
Cover ups, lies and refusal to answer questions have been the norm when we asked for information.
Our floodwardens have become independant and have funded insurance and equipment and had had enough support and donations from our village and others to buy a boat for future emergencies.
The last straw was when they were blamed for not panicking enough when asking for the sirens to sound and then to be told not to enter floodwater and they had to be retrained by the people who stood down on the evening of the flood and refused to sound the sirens.
We feel far safer without these people whom we think should have been sacked but have still kept their jobs.
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