London flood risk: Map shows areas of the capital most in danger

Independent article on London's floor risk areas:

'More than 300,000 homes in London are at risk of flooding from the Thames and the capital’s numerous other rivers, according to a new report.
  
Groundsure, an environmental risk consultancy, used Environment Agency and census data to calculate the places most in danger of damage.

Hammersmith and Fulham was found to be the worst borough for potential flooding, with almost 60,000 homes – 60 per cent of the borough - at risk.'

What to do with Coastal Real Estate?

David Holmgren exploring future scenarios: http://youtu.be/PQyw-2V37uw?t=58m

There's more on this topic in the latest John Michael Greer blogpost, Dark Age America: The Rising Ocean, wherein he discusses marine transgression:

'So far, at least, the vast East Antarctic ice sheet has shown only very modest changes, and most current estimates suggest that it would take something far more drastic than the carbon output of our remaining economically accessible fossil fuel reserves to tip it over into instability; this is a good thing, as East Antarctica’s ice fields contain enough water to drive sea level up 250 feet or so.  Thus a reasonable estimate for sea level change over the next five hundred years involves the collapse of the Greenland and West Antarctic sheets and some modest melting on the edges of the East Antarctic sheet, raising sea level by something over 50 feet, delivered in a series of unpredictable bursts divided by long periods of relative stability or slow change.

The result will be what paleogeographers call “marine transgression”—the invasion of dry land and fresh water by the sea. Fifty feet of sea level change adds up to quite a bit of marine transgression in some areas, much less in others, depending always on local topography. Where the ground is low and flat, the rising seas can penetrate a very long way...'

Greenhouse Britain

Greenhouse Britain

http://greenhousebritain.greenmuseum.org/exhibition/virtual-exhibition/

Preparing for change on the coast

2011 video from Managing Coastal Change about 'an innovative scheme to recreate salt marsh'.

Walking Crouchside - Easter Monday

Easter Monday

The riverside walk along the flood defences, west from Althorne to North Fambridge, cold eothen wind to the back. The partly flooded Bridgemarsh Island lies to the left for most of the journey. Enclosed by a 'sea wall' by 1736, when those same defences were partly destroyed, the island was once inhabited, farmed and had a brickworks, tile-works, shop and a school. But it would be slowly abandoned to the tides, as holding back the waters became more difficult and costly.  The island was overcome in the 1953 floods with remaining parts of its defences being taken to shore up others on the mainland south shore of the Crouch.

Learn more about Bridgemarsh Island in Essex Coastline:Then and Now by Matthew Fautley and James Garon (Matthew Fautley, 2004)

We cannot restore or repair everything that is lost

1953 Flooding in Essex

The Prime Minister (Mr. Winston Churchill):
 

I beg to move, That this House desires to record its deep sympathy with the Governments and peoples of the Netherlands and Belgium in the personal suffering and material loss inflicted on them by the unprecedented violence of the sea on the night of 31st January to 1st February, 1953, and its approval of the practical measures of assistance which have been extended by Her Majesty's Government in the United Kingdom; and further offers warm thanks on behalf of the people of the United Kingdom for the spontaneous generosity of friendly nations within and without the Commonwealth which has been freely proffered for the relief of the hardship and loss suffered by so many of Her Majesty's subjects on that occasion; And that this House, deeply moved by the calamity which befell this country on the same night, records its sympathy with all those who suffered bereavement, injury or material loss by tempest or flood; takes note of the declared intention of Her Majesty's Government to treat the catastrophe on a national basis; welcomes the welfare measures to mitigate suffering and distress and the measures to repair the damaged sea defences which were put in hand; acknowledges with gratitude the unremitting labours, during and since the disaster, of local and statutory authorities, police forces, voluntary organisations, and civilian workers, including voluntary workers; pays tribute to the magnificent work done by members of Her Majesty's Forces and the Forces of her Allies; and pledges its support in seeking the solution to the problems left by the disaster, many of which are recognised to be of a long-term character. The shock felt by the whole nation on hearing, for the first time, of the great storm which swept over the North Sea coasts during the night of 31st January has been followed, as the toll of tragedy and devastation has been counted, by a surge of deep concern and sympathy for all those who suffered. It is that sympathy and concern, especially for the relatives of those who died, which we wish to put on record today. We are resolved that the nation shall do everything within its power to make good the distress which this sudden disaster has brought to so many thousands of our fellow countrymen. We cannot restore or repair everything that is lost, but we shall seek to combine the generosity of the individual and the resources of the State so as to replace as best we may the homes and the furnishings which the seas by their invasion have destroyed.

Great as our own afflictions have been, the thoughts of the British Empire turned throughout these days to our neighbours in the Low Countries, whose ordeal was far harder than our own. I am indeed glad that our Armed Forces were able to lend their help to the people of the Netherlands, whose courage and resolution have again proved worthy of their famous past. We and they, too, have been encouraged and sustained by the generous and spontaneous offers of help which have poured in upon us from overseas. They have not only come from countries in our own Commonwealth and Empire, which have never failed us in our hour of need, but from peoples and Governments of many other lands.

Finally, we remember with gratitude and admiration the many thousands who worked day and night to bring relief to those in danger and distress—the Armed Forces of the Crown, the police, the local authorities, the Red Cross and St. John, the Civil Defence organisations, mustering at once at the sound of the alarm, the Women's Voluntary Services, most effective and intimate, the Salvation Army and the Church Army, and all the magnificent voluntary organisations which we never called upon in vain.

Then there are a vast number of unknown, but not less honourable, individuals who have shown themselves willing to prove that they are good neighbours in the hour of need, and who will unite or are capable of uniting effectively in good planning to prevent a renewed disaster. All engaged in this showed once again in various ways the quality and strength of our civilisation.

from the House of Commons debate on 19th February 1953, in Hansard vol 511 cc1456-580

As radioactive as an old joke

UK nuclear sites at risk of flooding

     Governments fall from sheer indifference. Authority figures,
deprived of the vampiric energy they suck off their constituents,
are seen for what they are: dead empty masks manipulated by
computers. And what is behind the computers? Remote control.
Of course. Don't intend to be here when this shithouse goes up.
Nothing here now but the recordings. Shut them off, they are
as radioactive as an old joke.
     Look at the prison you are in, we are all in. This is a penal
colony that is now a Death Camp. Place of the Second and Final
Death.
     Desperation is the raw material of drastic change. Only
those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed
in can hope to escape.

from The Western Lands (1988) by William S. Burroughs.

Great Storm, 1613

 

From a small quarto pamphlet of 1613. It was entitled:

 ‘The Wonders of the windie winter, by terrible stormes and tempests, to he losse of lives and goods of many thosands of men, women and children. The like by Sea and Land hath not been seene or heard of in this age of the world."

Waters with Banks confin'd; as in a Gaol

I sing Floods muzled, and the Ocean tam'd,
Luxurious Rivers gover-n'd, and reclam'd,
Waters with Banks confin'd; as in a Gaol,
Till kinder Sluces let them go on Bail;.
Streams curb'd with Dammes like Bridles, taught t'obey,.
And run as strait, as if they saw their way.

Samuel Fortrey (1685)

Huibers's Ark

Dutch artist Johan Huibers has completed building the 'Ark of Noah' a life size replica of the Old Testament boat (currently moored in Dordrecht, Netherlands).

Christian website Bible Verses helpfully provides some apposite Biblical quotes:

Managed Retreat

Along the eastern shore of Britain the line between sea and land has been sketched many times and any particular stroke we might consider now as definitive tells us more about our place in time than about the place’s place in space. Up and down the coast are fields re-claimed from the brine, drained, each one a little victory in a guerrilla campaign against the tide, fought for and barricaded in, fortified with bank and stone work. The war, of course, was actually lost millennia ago when climate change had worked its assault on the northern ice and a distant frozen fortification was undermined - releasing a tsunami across Doggerland, our Palaeolithic Atlantis, the fabled land bridge across which the first hominids had walked here. Since then the German Ocean, the North Sea, has provided our moat – a stretch of water separating the British archipelago from the continent to which it belongs.