To answer Sarah’s question – no, nothing has been done by either Thames Water or the Council. I went down this evening and opened up the manhole as you can see:A bit dark when I did so, but thankfully the flash picks out the detail – there are several inches of gap between the flap and the pipe, rusted open as per last posting’s photo.I doubt if people realise just how lucky we have been, and the way things are explained doesn’t help. Brentford’s flood defence walls are built to the standard 5.94mtrs AOD, which is classified as the level that might be expected once in a hundred years. Now as the saying goes, “there are lies, damned lies, and statistics.”The automatic response to the statistical prediction of such high flooding once every 100 years is to breath a sigh of relief that such an occasion is a long way off. It doesn’t work that way. Twice this year we have had tides around a metre over prediction for various reasons. We have just now experienced an extra heavy “rain event”.The last weekend’s “rain event” kept the level of the Brent here about a couple of feet above normal levels. Fortunately this coincided with low tides. Think on this though, - just how chancy was it that the rain didn’t coincide with high tides, which we may expect next week? When you consider that a couple of times this year Brentford was only a week away from catastrophic flooding as experienced elsewhere, the statistics don’t look so comforting. Any guarantees that it won’t be raining so heavily during next week’s high tides, - or any future ones?Had last week’s rainfall coincided with any of the previous above-prediction tides, the High Street would have been awash, and certainly the whole of the Brent Way western quarter would have been flooded out simply because there’s no flood defence in fact, while the maintenance is shrugged off.Of course, most of south of the High Street is unprotected flood plain anyway – which Ballymore want to raise and build on. That much more lost for absorption, that much more channelled into the Town. Government and London’s Mayor have pulled the teeth of English Heritage and the Environment Agency, so don’t expect anything constructive from them aside from murmured platitudes.I recommend living on boats myself, but then someone’s got to shoot down British Waterways also, before that becomes restricted to the sufficiently rich.
Nigel Moore ● 6577d