"Weatherlawyer" wrote in message
oups.com...
Farmers went mad after WW II cutting down trees ripping out hedges,
filling in ditches and planting drain pipes. There was once a great
deal of uncultivated marshland and cultivated water meadow in Britain.
All put to the pough these days; so the pressure is increased on the
land to dry it out either in use, in the drains or both.

Large spread-out connurbations that
Britain favours these days rather
than cramming everyone into towers,

Spread out? Where? Only 7.5% of the land is settled.

increases the flow rate. Think what
1/2 an inch of water on your roof
measures. There are tables online to
work it out.

Look at the ratio of hard standing
vss greenery in your area and
multiply it by the number of towns
in a road atlas or something and you
get the picture.

What picture is that?

If every home built had a cistern dug
that would allow the collection
of all water that fell on it to sink into
the land instead of forcing
it through to rivers, the problems
would change from floodings to
landslips.

The problem began in Victorian times
when rivers and streams were
annexed for sewers. Exacerbated in
WW I with the deadly need for
change in farming that brought. Then
as the indusrtialisation took
over, urban sprawl started to fill the
valleys up from historic ancient
towns

Where is this urban sprawl? I know of none as only 7,5% of the land is
settled and that includes greenspaces, which leaves about 2.5% paved.

that could not cope with the influx of
effluent caused.

So now they have to divert rivers and
enchain them and build flood barriers
and the like.

The impact of people directly on the land is miniscule. Agriculture is the
biggest influence by a million miles.

And all the while underground resevoirs are
emptying. What you are enthusing about
is an hi-tech answer and that
means yet more money.

The alternative is buld more resevoirs.
But the water companies are in
the hands of asset strippers

That they are.

so you can't see them investing in
resevoirs any time soon can you.

Nope. I can see them giving out dividends though.

What you can do is: move, build to cope or grin and bear it. In
biblical times householders -if rich enough, did build cisterns and
lined them to store water through their summers. (Apparently such
artifacts still exist in the Sahel where they were used to water stock
and are still usable if repaired.) But life was simpler then and a
public bath was a dip in a local river like everyone else.

We live in an hi-tech democracy, so whater the majority wants -no
matter how unreasonable, the majority might get. So beware what you
wish for. Some damned fool will press for it hard enough to get a vote
for it.

But you know yourself from the history of the area what hi-tech has
done over a number of centuries:
www.geog.cam.ac.uk/.../flobar1/studysites.html