YP Letters: No defence against water '“ so we must dredge

A street scene at the height of the recent floods.

i HAVE just read the article by Colin Mellors, chair of the Yorkshire Region Flood and Coastal Committee, to coincide with the Yorkshire floods one month on.

The committee states that there is no guaranteed way of protecting everyone everywhere from flooding; this is a statement of failure from the start.

Talking about “managing flood risk” and “improving resilience” becomes a statement of failure from the start.

Planting trees – it takes 50 to 100 years for a tree to grow. Asking farmers to build reservoirs costs billions. We don’t even pay them sufficient for the milk they produce.

Flooding farmland and turning fields into paddyfields to grow rice is plain stupid.

The flow of water cannot be stopped by barriers, pumps or storage.

It is impossible to build defences against the flow of water.

Water will always have a tendency to flow from the land to the sea.

The only solution to prevent flooding is to dredge the rivers deeply and widely and remove all obstacles from the rivers that block the free flow of water to the sea.