The Rain Makers

Today is Sunday, 12th June 2011 and it's cold and raining. "Nothing odd about that," I hear you cry. After all, this is an English summer. Wimbledon starts in a week or so and we are already lining up Cliff Richard on the Centre Court to "entertain" the crowds in the event of rain. But there is more to be said. After the coldest winter since ohhhhhhh ........... 1694 or since 1963 — at least — we have had a very dry spring — at least, we have in the South East corner of England. Down here, it really has been dry and April was a wonderful month the length and breadth of England. Even Scotland was relatively dry and warm. In East Anglia hardly any rain has fallen since February — 15mm [or just over ½ inch if you prefer proper units instead of these continental things dumped on us by Napoleon Bonaparte] they tell us. And that's not enough to even keep the dust down. Meanwhile, in the North of Scotland, it has been tipping it down. On a single day last week, parts of Scotland got over 2 inches of rain. On Friday various parts of England were officially designated drought zones. This means that all kinds of thing like washing cars, watering gardens, etc are banned and water companies are granted considerable extra powers to enforce the restrictions. Southern Water has not yet imposed any restrictions but they are making noises about using bath water in the garden and switching off the sprinklers. Soon they too will impose a hose-pipe ban and other restrictions — as they have done so many times in the past. Here in Crawley we are moving into the annual pictures of Weir Wood Reservoir season, when we are treated to illustrations of the water level that is so disastrously low that we are but one week away from the stand-pipes on the streets. In fact the level of water in Weir Wood at the moment is at 79%. This follows the cold and wet winter which kept water level in this reservoir at 100% for over 3 months and even the very dry spring has not yet taken us to the serious shortage stage.
Next week there will be a meeting organised by government ministers and including "experts" on water supply as well as representatives of the water supply companies and, of course, the regulatory body Ofwat. The purpose of the meeting is to discuss the drought and what can be done. At this moment, naturally, nothing can be done. At least this is a cheap solution. What we need, of course, is a real expert with a track record of success. The man we really need is the late Dennis Howell. Appointed by Harold Wilson in 1976 to deal with the serious drought over the whole country during the longest and hottest summer that anyone could remember, the minister brought everybody together, promised action and set off on a countrywide tour. Everywhere he went he was followed by rain. It rained and it rained and within a matter of a few months all was well. Lacking anyone with the proven rain making abilities of Mr Howell, as a country we need rather more prosaic solutions to the long on-going problem of water supplies. We are constantly urged to save water, to reduce the capacity of cisterns, not to water the gardens and so on. In recent times we have been told that the problems are those caused by global warming and that we must get used to reduced water supplies. For the most part these exhortations are based on complete nonsense. It may be that in the long term we will have a problem with rainfall on Britain but at this time, we do not. The primary cause of the problems with water supply in this country are incompetence by governments over many years.
I mentioned Weir Wood Reservoir above. This was built in 1953, just after the first houses had been built in Crawley — which is much the biggest town in North Sussex. But since then Crawley has grown to be a town with over 100,000 people with an international airport alongside — an airport that did not exist at all in 1953, yet now employs 35,000 people. Since the 1950s the population of England has risen from about 41 million to more than 50 million and it is still rising rapidly. An estimate only this last week has suggested that if current immigration trends and birth rates continue the population of Britain will increase by another 20 million by 2050. These are horrifying statistics. This country [England] is already over-crowded and particularly so in the south east. During the last fifty years little has been done to improve our water supply situation. The case of Weir Wood illustrates this well. I do not know if the planners when they started building Crawley envisaged that the population of the new town would ever exceed 100,000. I suspect that the answer is "No!" At the time, they estimated that one day, one family in four would own a motor-car and they were dramatically wrong with that. The fact is that our population is rising and, as we try to improve our standards of living, we demand more services. Water is a particularly severe problem only because it has been ignored for most of the last 50 years. The water system and the associated sewage system that we have now was installed by the Victorians when the population was less than half today's level. If that were not itself a recognition of the achievements of the Victorians, it is surely an indictment of most of the politicians since. Even when we are so often threatened with water restriction, the water companies admit that we lose 3.3 billion litres per day from our water supplies via leaks and the cause of this extra-ordinary leakage is the fact that the pipes are ancient, installed by the Victorians. In the 18th century it was common to complain about the state of the roads because not much repair work had been done since the Romans set them down in the 2nd century. The same logic lends itself to the excuses of the water companies. But, more, they say they would repair the leaks if the regulator Ofwat would let them spend more money. Of course, he stops them spending more money because he does not want rapid increases in water bills.
This country - the British Isles - has more than enough rain falling on it to guarantee every part of Britain has as much water as it could ever want. We collect a tiny proportion of the rainfall. As global warming possibly makes our climate subject to rather more extremes - heavy rain and serious flooding all over the place followed by long dry spells, hot weather and droughts — then we must organise water collection systems — reservoirs — to collect billions of gallons when rain is pouring down and water rushes down the mountains into the rivers and not have to bleat on about the shortages when there is no rain. The last major reservoir system that I can remember being built in Britain was the Kielder reservoir project in the 1970s that created the biggest man-made lake in Northern Europe and a 250 sq mile national park. There were many objectors at the time but the end result has been a marvelous wild life park, some grandiose scenery and a massive boost to water supplies in the north east. We need many more Kielder projects and we need to look at ducting [via the canals?] water from the north to the south east. I hope something more will come from this next week's meetings than more advice on saving water and blaming everything on climate change.
It is still raining — doing my garden a lot of good — and it is still cold — not so good,
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