100-year works aim to ease risk of Humber flooding

But the Environment Agency is preparing defences for a flood of 1953 proportions – a deluge that devastated the coastlines of the UK and the Netherlands.

The agency took the opportunity yesterday to show off some of its flood defence schemes in the Humber, as part of a 100-year plan to manage flood risk.

Since the last Ice Age sea levels have been rising by two millimetres a year, but that has now doubled.

Experts expect levels to be 3ft higher in 100 years.

So new defences are built to cope with the rise - as well as a potentially devastating repeat of the 1953 tidal surge.

The agency's Humber strategies manager, Philip Winn, says there is an "inevitability" about such an event, a rare combination of a storm tide and a tidal surge, given Britain's coastline, weather systems and geography.

He said: "These are going to be rare events – it is going to be every 100 to 150 years – but it is something to be conscious of and to plan for."

In such an event, farmland may well flood, but he believes there will be less damage to life, limb and property, as a result of the work that is being done.

Swinefleet, a small village on the bend of the River Ouse, which joins the Humber near Goole, is one place the agency has been spending millions to prevent the river breaking through the defences and rushing in a powerful and dangerous torrent into the 300 homes, directly in the firing line.

A 30 to one risk of flooding has dropped to one in 200 as a result of a new 11.9m scheme which uses two rows of steel sheet piling to create formidable new defences.

Mr Winn said: "Over the next 100 years we are predicting a rise of about three feet, so all our schemes take these risks into account.

"You can raise all the defences but inevitably there are places where the water can creep round.

"The most difficult thing is having water rushing at you as a result of defence failure."

Further down the river is Alkborough Flats, where the Environment Agency has lowered river defences and made a breach in the embankment to allow water in and out.

Yesterday cattle were grazing peacefully on the saltmarsh but in a major flood it will act as a safety valve, storing millions of cubic metres of water and protecting nearby homes from flooding.

The agency expects it to be needed every five to 10 years.

At Brough on the opposite side of the river work started three weeks ago on a 5.6m scheme designed to protect homes and the BAE Systems.

A boat from Humber Rescue takes in Read's Island in a final swoop before returning to its berth in the shadow of the Humber Bridge. The low-lying island has almost halved in size in recent years as the river channel shifts southwards.

But Mr Winn is in no doubt that climate change and a rise in sea level is also a factor: "One of the things that we are most conscious of is that sea levels are rising. It is not maybe - they are.

"For thousands of years sea levels have been rising, about 2mm since the last Ice Age, but what we have noticed in the last 10 to 15 years is an increase in the rate of the rise – that's to do with global warming – and we are starting to see a fiercer rate of rise that has been anticipated for a long time."

A major factor is the thermal expansion of sea water, an effect which Mr Winn compares with looking at the level of coffee in a cup prepared with freshly boiled water and seeing how it drops as it cools.

Disaster killed thousands

The Dutch call it the Watersnoodramp "the flood disaster", a major natural deluge which claimed 1,835 lives in Holland alone, mostly in the south-western province of Zeeland.

The tidal surge which struck on the night of January 31 to February 1, 1953, was an incredible 5.6m over mean sea level, and the avalanche of water overwhelmed sea defences causing extensive flooding.

In the UK 307 people lost their lives in Lincolnshire, Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex and almost 100,000 hectares of eastern England were flooded.

Twenty eight people were killed in West Flanders, Belgium. Another 230 died along northern European coasts.

Many fishing trawlers sank and there were 133 fatalities when the ferry MV Princess Victoria was lost at sea.

In all, around 2,400 lives were lost.