YP Letters: Blame thin end of the dredge for Yorkshire's flood misery

A Chinook helicopter delivers materials to repair York's flood barrier.

THERE were a number of letters (The Yorkshire Post, January 19) suggesting solutions to flooding. Two of the letters were blaming the EU for making it illegal to dredge rivers and the European Water Framework Directive (WFD) was cited.

I have read this document and nowhere does it mention anything whatsoever of whether it is a good or bad thing to dredge rivers. The WFD is largely concerned with the purity of the water and action to be taken to prevent chemical pollution, no bad thing when one considers that most of our drinking water comes from various rivers.

Whether to dredge a river or not is entirely a matter for our own government through Defra and the Environment Agency. I know that the latter is not keen to dredge rivers as it believes it is not as cost-effective as other flood prevention measures and can be harmful to wildlife.

My view is that if rivers have historically been dredged and, therefore, communities have grown up around dredged rivers, then it is foolish not to continue to do so. That message should be sent loud and clear.

And we should put blame where it belongs, that is on our own government for not providing the Environment Agency with sufficient funds for all types of flood prevention measures.

From: ME Wright, Harrogate.

ENVIRONMENT Secretary Liz Truss states that flood defence budgets have been set for the next six years and do not include the £180m for the Kirkstall-Leeds project (The Yorkshire Post, January 21). It will be interesting to see if, during those same six years, yet another generous hand goes down the back of some hitherto unexplored Treasury sofa and produces yet another magical £15bn for London’s Crossrail 2.

From: D Webb, Rothwell.

DURING the last 50 years, winter rainfall has increased by 30 per cent. We have covered the soil with Tarmac, concrete etc and that’s only the gardens, built on floodplains. Then we wonder why we get floods. What would our traffic problems be like if we had failed to build dual carriageways, motorways, bypasses etc?

So we are dealing with higher winter rainfall and the faster run-off of this rain. We need deeper watercourses, extra watercourses to bypass areas of population. I don’t think we can stop flooding but with some forward thinking we could control which areas  are flooded.