The recent flooding has been very bad, but not entirely without precedent. Peter Luff has shown me an old postcard he has found, dated August 1912, of the approaches to Tewkesbury completely submerged under water.
It was the severity of the summer floods which came as such a shock, though, as Peter’s postcard shows, even summer floods have not been totally unknown in the past.
However, it is almost impossible to exaggerate the financial misery suffered by some farmers last summer. Their finances will take years to recover from having their entire crops killed off.
Farmers are not the only victims. There are several of my constituents still living in temporary accommodation; and local taxpayers may take a pounding when the county’s budget is announced in early April this year.
A noticeable impact of the heavy rains has been on the roads. The capital costs of the required major roadworks resulting from the floods have been around £6 million.
The question is who will be stumping up the money for this repair work? The answer is that it can only be the national or the local taxpayer.
If the Government were to refuse to make good the gap in the county council’s budget, the shortfall could mean an extra £30 on every Band D council taxpayers’ bill.
There is another potentially costly leftover from the floods.
The traumas of the summer were on this occasion only partly due to the swelling up of the Severn and the Avon. Just as great an impact as the breaking of the river banks was the effect of the saturation and flooding of thousands of small ditches and gullies.
In some cases these overflowed simultaneously causing horrific tidal waves to leap from fields.
It was these freak mini tsunamis which severely damaged properties in villages such as Sedgeberrow and Uckinghall. The responsibility for undertaking the necessary cleaning up of the ditches is a matter of dispute between the county and the landowners.
My job is to make sure that the situation is not exploited by the insurance companies.
It is also to ensure that the Environment Agency completes as soon as possible the defences required to protect those living around rivers but not in such a way as to push the water towards ‘inland’ victims who are less experienced in coping with waterlogged disaster.