Othen

The area around Wainfleet is not generally new builds by developers, it is mostly individual and small groups of constructions over the past 60ish years. The dyke that was originally built to drain the arable land (it would have been marsh) was probably adequate for its purpose - it would not have mattered much if some fields flooded once in 100 years - but now the place is used for residential houses people notice a lot more.

I suppose the problem is mostly that the population keeps rising by around 300,000/year - and has done for the past 60 years. Those people have to live somewhere and the country is a finite size, so we let people build settlements on farming land. The rise in population is partly due to us living longer (most people like the idea of that) and partly due to economic migration (which was actively encouraged in the 50s and 60s, much less so since the 90s but successive governments have been powerless to reduce it).

I’ll be really surprised if England’s population decreases, or even stops growing at 300,000/year in my lifetime, so there will be more Wainfleets from time to time (there were dozens of them in the summer of 2007, but our memories of such matters are not so good (if I remember correctly Wainfleet did not flood that year, but I think Horncastle did)).

Not many people want to live at the top of hills - otherwise the most densely populated areas would be at the tops of the mountains in Wales and Scotland.

I can’t help being impressed by the emergency response to the Wainfleet flooding - but at the same time it does seem a bit needlessly expensive when there is no threat to life, just to property. In particular the sight of a RAF Chinook (costing the taxpayer thousands of pounds per hour) dropping tiny amounts of sand and ballast I thought was quite amusing - more playing to the TV audience than actual use, but still good to see the nation giving its support.

Back to chatting about Suzuki SV 650 motorcycles...


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