Page 32 Daily Mail, Thursday, March 5, 2020
N
o one who saw Bryony Sadler’s
reaction, after being informed
that floodwater had poured into
her family’s smallholding — a
handsome Victorian rectory set
on a seven-acre plot in the Somerset
Levels — will easily forget her anguish.
Having remained in the house for a month,
watching the inexorable advance of a foul green
tide from the swollen River Tone, four miles away,
she had just been evacuated along with her
husband, Gavin, their two young children, and
their menagerie of animals: dozens of chickens, a
pony, rabbits, guinea pigs and two dogs.
And in a scene that became an emblem of the
catastrophe that had beset hundreds of families
living on the Levels, as violent storms battered
western england, a BBC camera crew captured
the moment the police phoned her with the news
she had been dreading.
Mrs Sadler’s first reaction was to clasp her head
in her hands in despair. ‘We’ve virtually lost it all,
then,’ she uttered through tear-stained fingers,
envisaging the end of an idyllic rural lifestyle that
had taken years to build.
That was in the winter of 2014, when the Levels
— a vast, low-lying natural drain for the network
of tidal rivers flowing off the surrounding hills, and
prone to serious flooding — were deluged by some
of the worst floods in memory.
As the 160,000-acre expanse was submerged,
hundreds of homes were destroyed and the farm-
land became a vast lake. The village of Muchelney
from David
Jones
On the sOmerset levels
2014
proof
you caN
turN back
the tide
was turned into an island —
intrepid former Mail reporter Paul
Harris got there by rowing boat.
What an extraordinary contrast
with the scene that greeted me in
the Levels.
While many areas of england and
Wales have been inundated after
huge rainstorms — this week it
was the turn of towns in east
Yorkshire along the River Aire, last
w e e k i t w a s S h r e w s b u r y,
Ironbridge, and Worcester along
the River Severn — in the Levels,
by some small miracle, the streets
and houses are dry.
Admittedly, rainfall in the area in
January and February 2014 was
almost twice as heavy as it has
been in the first two months of
2020, yet this month’s rain was still
70 per cent above average.
Furthermore, the autumn of 2019,
when 526.9 mm of rain fell, was far
wetter than that of 2013, when
3 89.5 mm did, so we might have
expected the water-table to rise
even higher this time around.
Given such wet weather, 44-year-
old Mrs Sadler feels sure that the
roads and fields would have been
underwater in bygone years.
y
eT although her Alexa
smart speaker annoy-
ingly parrots the latest
flood alerts, there is not
the slightest sign of the disastrous
6ft surge that forced her family to
‘live out of boxes’ for nine months,
until their home and business were
restored by way of a £500,000
insurance pay-out (some Levels
residents had no coverage and are
still suffering the consequences).
‘You can see a few puddles on the
fields, and the ground around the
house is a bit soggy,’ she told me,
gesturing through the window.
‘But it really isn’t much, consider-
ing the amount of rain we’ve had.’
It certainly isn’t, as I saw when
strolling down the road people
rowed along in 2014.
Yes, water lapped the hedgerows,
but this is normal for the Levels in
winter. It would have needed to
rise by many feet before impeding
passing cars.
Since new environment Secretary
George eustice was attacked by
t h e Fa r m e r s ’ U n i o n f o r t h e
Government’s perceived tardiness
in tackling the flooding crisis (he
r e s p o n d e d b y p l e d g i n g t o
sp e n d ‘ r e c o r d ’ a m o u n t s o n
defences, but laid much of the
blame on climate change), this
begs some pertinent questions.
How have the Levels managed to
the hold back the torrents? Why is
the area better protected now
than in 2014? And could themethods that worked here be used
with similar effect elsewhere?
of course, when it comes to
topography, no two areas are alike;
and the means of combating
upstream floods, for example, will
differ from tactics used in an area
such as the Levels, which lie close
to the coast and rise only a few feet
above sea-level.
nonetheless, according to David
Hall, chairman of the Somerset
Rivers Authority, the work that
has reduced the risk of flooding in
this unusual West Country swathe,
with its Dutch-style man-madedykes, could be adapted as a ‘tem-
plate’ for other flood-prone areas.
And he believes they could learn
invaluable lessons by studying the
intriguing story behind the great
Levels flood of 2014.
At the heart of the story lies an
ideological power struggle between
a powerful Green lobby — hide-
bound by idealistic but danger-
ously impractical eU wildlife direc-
tives — and more traditional
guardians of the countryside.
The Levels have been flooded
periodically since early medieval
times, when monks first reclaimedt h e b o g g y l a n d f o r f a r m i n g.
However, until 25 years ago, a
w a t e r - m a n a g e m e n t s y s t e m ,
modernised and refined over the
centuries, ensured its houses
largely remained dry.
It hinged on regularly dredging
the silt that washes up from the
Bristol Channel and slows the flow
of the four main rivers. Unless this
is removed, during heavy rainfall it
can cause them to burst their
banks. A series of pumping sta-
tions also removed excess water.
But matters changed when stew-
ardship of rural england’s land,special report
Pictures: SWNS