Hurricanes and the Carlisle Floods.

Watching the news with Hurricane Ike battering into the Texas coastline along with the evacuation of Galveston it is easy for us Brits to think that this is maybe someone else's problem. How wrong can we be.....not only will it impact oil production in the Gulf of Mexico but it will also create uncertainty in a difficult economic climate. But what i really wanted to say is that over here in Britain, in a much smaller way we have had our own floods and  mass evacuation with all the problems that follow on from this.

Back in early January 2005 a combination of extreme rainfall, high tides and poor flood defences resulted in the city of Carlisle with some 70,000 souls being well and truly flooded.Fortunately there was minimal looting here but security and the safety of the residents  was still really important.

The BBC have plenty of photographs to illustrate the problems on that dark day.

The environment minister ordered a full report into the disaster and these are quotes from it

First the back ground

"A major storm produced exceptional amounts of rain over a 36 hour period, leading to overtopping of defences and flooding of some 3,000 properties.

Two lives were lost and many residents were evacuated. I had the opportunity to see for myself the floods' devastating effects.

These reports show how flooding came from both the rivers and from surface water routes. This combination can result from very heavy, localised rain falling over short periods of time - it was also a feature of recent flooding in North Yorkshire.

Then a rather long winded way to say that lessons need to be learnt and we need to be better prepared.

The reports identify a number of areas where the local emergency services and other responders can themselves build on the experiences of January this year and it is important that we should take on these lessons more widely, so building our overall capability for managing flood emergencies in the future.

It is also important that all services, utilities, business and householders who are at risk should do what they can to strengthen their resilience to flooding, especially as we are likely to see a greater frequency of such events in future years given the expected impact of climate change.

The report then, not surprisingly, goes into more and more detail and eventually you forget about the human suffering and misery which these disasters can cause.

So to round this all up our thoughts are with the Texans who are facing Hurricane Ike. The problems they have to deal with will be extreme, but in a small way we too have seen the chaos which bad weather can bring and out of this we pray for them.