On behalf of the South Oxford Flood Action Group (SOFAG) I enjoyed your letter from Prof Edmund Penning-Rowsell on the proposed Oxford and Abingdon flood relief scheme ( July 19).

Edmund and I had met outside Wickes’ Oxford store just two days previously and I got excellent advice from him on choice of a belt sander, together with his view of the flood relief proposal much as his letter.

My response, then and now, was that Oxford was beginning to appreciate the need for something proactive.

A case in point is South Oxford’s Weirs Lane estate, built to resist a repeat of the (then record) 1894 flood. SOFAG’s estimate on the basis of historic photos is that this January was similar to both 2007 and 1894 and it is prudent to allow for climate change effects. Your correspondent is right that many of his ‘few score’ flooded homes have been dry since 2007, which we would attribute to the Environment Agency (EA) and the city council having learnt to protect them with bund, pump and hard slog.

There are however 210 homes on the Weirs Lane estate alone that will flood simultaneously with a climate-change increment, bringing a huge additional load on the emergency services.

One thing that Edmund and I did agree, face to face, was that the EA would have been prudent to cost the most expensive of their route options at this early stage.

Taking account then of potential savings in construction; of the benefit to Abingdon; of reputational benefits to Oxford as a place of excellence; of a life-belt to estates like Weirs Lane teetering on the edge, given scholarly estimates of climate change effects; and the uncertainty in his figures on the ‘return’, there could equally be a glass-half-full outcome to my friend’s calculation.

Brian Durham, Research Associate, Research Laboratory for Archaeology, University of Oxford Co-chairman, South Oxford Flood Action Group; Steering Group member, Oxford Flood Alliance

 

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