Floods of despair as rain adds to misery of lockdown – David Behrens

If just one more email drops into my inbox imploring me to “stay safe”, I’m going to leave the internet. After a week as depressing as any I can remember, it is staying sane that will be the harder trick to pull off.
Flooding in Otley this weekFlooding in Otley this week
Flooding in Otley this week

It was bad enough before the floods came. Mrs B and I had been in Ilkley last Sunday morning, enjoying a stroll across the suspension bridge over the Wharfe in what seemed like pleasant autumnal weather. When we returned for an evening meal, after just a few hours of rain, the river was almost as high as the crossing. The bridge downstream in Otley was submerged.

This is not unusual for the time of year, but it was made more miserable by the apparent ease with which it happened and by the storm of despair swirling around the rest of life.

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The River Wharfe from the suspension bridge in IlkleyThe River Wharfe from the suspension bridge in Ilkley
The River Wharfe from the suspension bridge in Ilkley

“I can’t believe this is happening again,” said a resident of Otley, while the Government’s Environment Agency announced in its usual non-committal way that “incident response staff” were “closely monitoring the forecast”, which was literally the least they could have done. Their actual response was not specified, so the whole thing was really no more effective than a track and trace app for the weather.

The frequency with which this sort of flooding occurs, not only in lower Wharfedale but further upstream in the Dales and right across Yorkshire, betrays the lack of intent on the part of officials to do anything about it. For Ministers especially – as the York MP, Rachael Maskell, pointed out – flooding represents a photo opportunity at which to appear concerned, but little else. When the water runs away, so do the Ministers, leaving behind promises to be flushed down the drain.

The behaviour of some in the private sector has been even worse. This week’s long-awaited and tardy review into the floods in South Yorkshire at this time last year, found that many people whose homes were ruined had been sold insurance that specifically excluded cover for flood damage. That’s like flogging someone a holiday policy that lapses the moment you leave the house. It’s a Dickensian practice which ought to have been outlawed decades ago in an industry supposedly so regulated.

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Flooding in Otley this weekFlooding in Otley this week
Flooding in Otley this week

But it’s a question of priorities. We seem resigned to leaving homes and roads to the mercy of the elements because an accountant somewhere has deemed that protecting them would not yield a sufficient return on investment. It’s an upshot of putting policy-making in the hands of ‘bean counters’ for whom human misery does not cloud the equation.

The same can be said of the medical statisticians who forecast the consequences for the NHS in the event of a new lockdown not being imposed. I’m not challenging the accuracy of their prognosis, but its problem is that it fails to take into account the long-term harm of the quarantine itself – not only to the livelihood of millions whose businesses have been dealt the cruellest of blows at their busiest time of year, but also to the mental health of families who are now under effective house arrest for the next four weeks.

This was a point not lost on the charities Mind and Carers UK, who said the new quarantine would be “the greatest test of our mental health this year”. The fallout from that will come back to haunt the NHS, and this second lockdown may come to be seen as a short-term gain for longer-term pain.

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It certainly won’t be like last spring, when the fear of something new and unknown united nearly all of us. That could only happen once. The refusal since then of many people even to wear a face mask when out shopping points to the futility of the new restrictions, however inevitable they became.

This indifference to the law seems to be an urban phenomenon. In the badlands of Lancashire, my son tells me he takes his life in his hands every time he dashes in and out of his local Lidl, like a masked ninja engaged in a game that’s half Supermarket Sweep, half germ warfare. The crowded sixth form college where he works by day is a safe harbour in comparison.

Back in Ilkley, the sight on Thursday morning of the shutters going up on so many shops that had been trading happily at the weekend was deeply depressing. The floodwater had gone but so had any last hope that this would all be over before Brexit – or the American election.

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In the winter of discontent that stretches out ahead, that is enough to test anyone’s sanity.

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