Brain drain – a lack of sense over our rivers

However, the Environment Agency is heavily biased towards policies which do not recognise the rights of people to the maintenance of a good drainage infrastructure which has been developed over many centuries.

The recommendation is for more swampy land with a supposed slower dispersal of rainwater.

In my former experience as a drainage contractor and a drainage officer for the old Ministry of Agriculture, I would suggest just the reverse.

Well-drained land with a properly controlled water table will act as a sponge to provide a buffer for runoff. Provision of more swampy land will merely exacerbate the hard surface runoff that we have created from increased development of roads and houses building.

My expertise is on the lowland, but I would have thought the same argument applies to moorland. The answer has to be better maintenance of the drainage infrastructure handed down to us over the centuries. Proper dredging, increased pumping capacity and the reopening of main arterial waterways and ditches, so carelessly filled in by people who do not understand the importance of good drainage. One wonders if some of these people who refuse to dredge ever clean out the rainfall gutters on their house. A nation which does not maintain its infrastructure and allows the flooding of houses built on the flood plain deserves to go back to a Third World status.

A case in point is the siting of a pontoon right in the middle of the River Hull just so some developer can make a huge profit.

From: Jack Caley, Aldbrough, Hull.

From: Yvonne Spencer, Crossways Crescent, Harrogate.

I was interested last week to see Roger Ratcliffe's picture of frogspawn: An indicator of spring. We have a small pond in our garden and welcome the frogspawn each year. Some weeks ago there had been some "activity" in the pond and a couple of weeks or so later I wandered up the garden (after a very keen frost) to look for snowdrops under the hedge and on the way peered into the pond to see a rather large dead frog in the water, which looked to me as if it had been ready to spawn.

Not knowing a lot about frogs I just wondered whether the severe frost had killed it or whether it was just old age as we think this frog has been with us for quite some time.