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This is an extract from the most recent edition of Temperature Check, The Journal’s monthly climate newsletter. To receive Temperature Check to your inbox, sign up in the box at the end of this article.
When Storm Babet hit the south of the country this month, it left destruction in its wake which locals said they couldn’t remember seeing in decades. The scale of the chaos it wrought has been a reminder for many, and a wake-up call for others, that climate change is increasing the risk of more frequent and more intense storms.
After Storm Babet, Alan O’Connor, a Cork councillor based in Carrigtwohill, told Temperature Check that he visited an apartment building where some of the ground floor apartments had flooded.
“I spoke to a resident and it was heartbreaking. They moved in only recently and now they’ve had to move out until repairs are made.”
“People got in touch to try to bring to the council’s attention places where there was a need for sandbags or where roads had been flooded and damage had been done to put it on the council’s list of work,” O’Connor said.
“I took photographs of the places where flooding happened. Hopefully that can contribute to an assessment of what’s happened, how the floods have impacted people, and how we can mitigate against that going forward.”
That’s really the question now – what can be done to try to protect communities from the impacts of this type of extreme weather event again?
Dr Mary Bourke is an Associate Professor of Geography at Trinity College Dublin whose research specialises in geomorphology and natural flood management.
Speaking to The Journal for Temperature Check, Dr Bourke explained: “The real problem is that we haven’t recognised that by building on floodplains, we are putting ourselves in harm’s way. There are historical reasons for that [...] but we’re now dealing with the fact that we are in the way of natural floods.”
“Traditionally, we decided we were going to build the walls of the river higher and make the floor of the river deeper by dredging,” she said. “That worked – it got the water through the villages and towns without overtopping the bank – but all that was doing was moving the problem to the next neighbour down from there.”
Instead, rather than trying to seize control of nature, she said, we need to learn to work with it – a technique called nature-based solutions.
“There’s two approaches in Ireland. One is the hard engineering that will have to be deployed in these towns and villages that historically have evolved around a river system, because you’re not going to move a town and you’re not going to move a village,” Dr Bourke said.
“That’s fine, but there are a lot of other things that can be done and have been deployed across Europe that are really, really successful in terms of working with the river natural system.
“If you allow a river to reconnect to its own floodplain, the one that it built before we tried to straighten it, that slows everything down a little bit because it’s got to go the long way around rather than the short way down, and all of these measures that slow things down a little bit join together to be very, very effective.”
She pointed to how climate change means Ireland is “going to see a lot more floods and we’re going to see that the rain causing these floods is torrential”.
“We need to be approaching this not just thinking about one problem. At the moment, we’re building houses that are trying to be A-rated for energy consumption, and that’s fine, that’s good, but you can’t ignore the fact that we’re coming into a climate you also need to build house that are protected from floods,” she said.
“Stop thinking about one thing and think about what is the maximum we can get out of a particular development in terms of protecting people from climate change.”
Dr Mary Bourke also spoke on the most recent episode of The Journal’s The Explainer podcast. You can listen back to it on our website.
Similarly, Councillor Alan O’Connor emphasised that the floods must be seen in the context of climate change rather than as isolated events.
“In my experience, this feels like the first event of an extremity where the impact has been severe and it’s really brought home to me the risks of climate change,” he said.
“In terms of what we need to do going forward, I think we can’t omit to mention the climate question. Mitigating climate, taking climate action, reducing our emissions, and trying to reduce the severity of these events going forward,” he said. “We’re a small country, of course, but one person, one country, can make a difference.”
“These things will become more intense. Even if we take good climate action, flooding may happen again, it may become more frequent. The rainfall event which happened recently is very likely to happen again, so then we must look to adaptation.”
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Perhaps we could help ourselves by better planning and maintenance of existing drainage systems
@Spanner: don’t be talking sense, Eamon loves blaming Rural Ireland for towns and cities being flooded.
It’s coz everyone has paved their gardens for driveways
@GVR: That is true but it puts the cart before the horse to an extent. Yes, the building boom in the Celtic Tiger era contributed to flooding, large shopping centre car parks, housing estates and factories built with hectares of impervious roof, tarmac and concrete, but these should have been built with detention and retention basin by developers and councils. Detention and retention basins are temporary water storage areas that retain water and slowly discharge to rivers, lower the pulse of flood water.
However, during the building boom, not build enough of these basins were built and as a result, rain poured directly into rivers. This was a reason behind the 2000, 2002, twice in 2005, and 2011 Tolka River floods (previous flooding events were rarer, 1880, 1954, 1965, 1986).
When watching the 2002 Tolka flood an elderly woman told me the bridge was washed away along with the statue of the Virgin Mary in 1954, that was a different level. Old Pathé film about floods in Dublin:
Yes, I remember the Tolka flooding and before that I remember my parents going out to stack sandbags against the bridges of the Dodder, along with plenty of other neighbours who didn’t even live near the banks of the Dodder. They all went out and did this when it started to rain heavily. The same way that they helped each other to push-start a car in winter. It was clear to people then what could be done before houses were swamped. It’s so frustrating waiting for councils to put in a plan after ground floors have already been flooded out once. What shocked me was all those small businesses in Newry that can’t get flood insurance now. Maybe years ago it was cheaper to rebuild than put in storm overflow ponds, but now it costs so much after the damage is done.
@David Jordan: This is a most pertinent comment .
I agree
People on here seem to think if you took some leaves out of a few drains there would be no issues. Others calling for the dredging of every bit of life and canalisation of our rivers. Better land management seems to be a good long term solution but it’ll be viewed as anti rural university nonsense.
Scientists have predicted we’ll be getting much wetter in the coming years so we should probably get some kind of plan in place.
@eoin fitzpatrick: Plans like Eamonn Ryan looking for 1200 houses to be built in Dublin Port……… I am at a loss to see forward planning there!!
@Ollie Fitzpatrick: no idea what eamon’s plans are for housing, didn’t realise that was part of his remit
@eoin fitzpatrick: He may not be Minister of Housing but that doesn’t stop spouting manure about housing issues or anything else for that matter.
You know exactly what I am talking about unless you were isolated in a dark cave with no access to media matters. Google it and pass comment then!!
@Ollie Fitzpatrick: I was passing comment on flooding and what we can do about it, not some housing plan Eamon Ryan came up with
@eoin fitzpatrick: Not building houses in an area that’s could be affected
by flooding with rising sea levels (like Dublin Port) would be a prudent decision for a start. But this current government don’t do prudency!
As regards flooding in general, government, planners, local authorities and developers have an awful lot of responsibility to accept.
@Ollie Fitzpatrick:
In fairness Ollie if the next government, whoever they are, can get their hands on prime Dublin land like the port do you think they wouldn’t build on it???
Loling at the idea that we Irish could ever competently manage any huge problem.
In that respect we’re like the Yanks with their guns: a permanent failure.
Let me guess, the same culture that can’t build anything on time or on budget can magically undertake a nationwide rethink of every waterway near a house?
And planning permission will suddenly be managed competently, on a national level, minus any corruption?
Property owners will suddenly change a century of selfish behaviour for the benefit of their neighbours?
Government will invest properly for decades?
This is magical thinking at its most obscene.
The best we can do is elect the worst people, for selfish reasons, then play dumb when it’s a disaster. And of course, fall back on conspiracy theories to avoid feeling any guilt for our behaviour.
Nature knows what to do,humans are only an interference.
When we’re gone earth will recover.
@John Sleator: The great George Carlin once said. The Earth is going nowhere.. “We are, so pack your $#!t folk’s!!!
Just dredge all the rivers and make them deeper, wider like they did years ago with the diggers on the barges over the last 30 years they have slowly closed up ,better maintenance on road drainage and farm land will help massively .Harbour in my town used to be nearly 100ft now it’s only about 50 and river up too it was 45ft now its 20max over the years its got shallower and narrowed.
@M G: Google pros and cons of dredging. Historically there were fewer storms and a lot more natural soakage. The coming storms are pouring off concrete and areas without forests straight into wide rivers that have been straightened.
These flow too fast to prevent floods. All that dredging could do is to drain the floodwaters off quicker afterwards. Pumping helps.
Plus when you speed up a river flow so drastically, you also take away the gravel & roots that held the channel in shape. The strength of that fast flood erodes the banks, the piers of bridges, and undermines them.
The best way is slowing the flow, adding soakage to stall the floods so they don’t wash everything away before them.
Directly after the state had a meeting (citizens assembly) on the environment, there was a conclusion that lights were harmful to the overall biodiversity of our beautiful island.
What was the direct response from government (and I mean direct), erect gawdy l.e.d. advertisements on our roads!!!
These people are not democrats, they don’t respect your vote, nor your opinion!
Water just flowing off every surface in a town or city straight into the next available waterway is bad planning, soakage where water falls would help a lot in many ways, like building water table reservoirs.
On a personal level, water falling on a single house site could soak more and disperse less to be dealt with elsewhere I think
More government financial support should be made available to golf club drainage schemes. My club has been closed for two weeks due to flooding. Shameful.
@TC Murphy: 2 weeks no golf, the horror. CPO all golf courses and turn them into natural forest, I’d vote for that.
@TC Murphy:
You had two options,
Go fishing on the golf course or go fishing on the journal comments section……..
@TC Murphy: ring big Phil
Look, how many times? You ALL Know its coming. How about the whole of community from the affected towns working together for Prevention in the Summer months Well ahead of the storms. Allow water to take a different safer course to avoid these floods.
Nature will only control you, if you constantly allow it.
The scientific method cheerleaders here use ‘Nature’ the same way the old denominational Christians used ‘God’.
Most of you are victims of the modelling subculture and live in a type of bubble surrounded by doom and gloom as though separate from the Earth itself. We live in Eternity, and individuals are meant to appreciate as much as possible about our surroundings and all the things that make life possible. The motions of the Earth in a Sun-centred system are connected to the Earth’s sciences of climate geology and biology, yet modellers can’t link one rotation of the planet with one 24-hour day/night cycle.
@Gearoid O’Ceilleachair: What do you recall of the eternity in which you have lived?
@Chutes: How long have you got son ?
There areca surprising number of experts on the subject posting comments.
A big pipe, under the river bed and risers for overflow. In all major rivers, directed towards coast and released on to slipway into sea or too a reservoir. Let gravity do the rest, it can work and should be considered.
Walk any roadside and see the amount of plastic bottles and drinks cans – these work their way into rivers and streams. Walk any beach along the high tide mark and you’ll see all the waste washed up. We have people throwing this stuff into nature and others that just walk past it with indifference.
So we obviously have a large cohort of people that don’t recognise the importance or necessity of living in a clean environment. Broaden that little example across broader environmental and societal issues and it’s no surprise we are where we are.
There is no excuse in this day and age.
I remember watching the Olympic marathon in Japan, some of the runners launched their used water bottles as far away as possible, flinging them into the canals and so in, even though bins were put out alongside them, pure ignorance, selfishness really.
have your say