NALOPKT
"Amid all the devastation and recrimination over the floods in
Cumbria hardly anybody mentions one factor that may not be the sole
cause, but certainly hasn’t helped, and that is the almost complete
cessation of dredging of our rivers since we were required to accept the
European Water Framework Directive (EWF) into UK law in 2000.
Yet
until then, for all of recorded history, it almost went without saying
that a watercourse needed to be big enough to take any water that flowed
into it, otherwise it would overflow and inundate the surrounding land
and houses. Every civilisation has known that, except apparently ours.
It is just common sense. City authorities and, before them, manors and
towns and villages, organised themselves to make sure their watercourses
were cleansed, deepened and sometimes embanked to hold whatever water
they had to carry away. ...................But all this changed with the creation of the Environment Agency in
1997 and when we adopted the European Water Framework Directive in 2000.
No longer were the authorities charged with a duty to prevent flooding.
Instead, the emphasis shifted, in an astonishing reversal of policy, to
a primary obligation to achieve ‘good ecological status’ for our
national rivers. This is defined as being as close as possible to
‘undisturbed natural conditions’. ‘Heavily modified waters’, which
include rivers dredged or embanked to prevent flooding, cannot, by
definition, ever satisfy the terms of the directive. So, in order to
comply with the obligations imposed on us by the EU we had to stop
dredging and embanking and allow rivers to ‘re-connect with their
floodplains’, as the currently fashionable jargon has it.
And
to ensure this is done, the obligation to dredge has been shifted from
the relevant statutory authority (now the Environment Agency) onto each
individual landowner, at the same time making sure there are no funds
for dredging. And any sand and gravel that might be removed is now
classed as ‘hazardous waste’ and cannot be deposited to raise the river
banks, as it used to be, but has to be carted away."
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