Business continuity and disaster recoveryIs flooding really as big a risk to Britain now as terrorism?

One of the Big Questions being asked in Britain is whether flooding poses as great a risk to public welfare as terrorism. Michael McCarthy of the Independent offers his answers, which we summarize below. First, though, why are we asking this now? Because the other day, Sir Michael Pitt published his long-awaited report on last year’s disastrous summer flooding in Yorkshire and the Severn valley around Gloucester and Tewkesbury, which caused the largest peacetime emergency in Britain since the Second World War. It said that the importance of flood risk should be “brought up alongside the risk of terrorism or a major flu pandemic.” To emphasis this, there should be a government cabinet committee concerned solely with flooding, he said. The main reason Sir Michael offered was that floods hit much more than just houses. In studying them, Sir Michael, an engineer and former local authority chief executive, was struck by just how quickly major parts of Britain’s infrastructure, such as water-pumping stations, electricity sub-stations and the transport networks could be, and were, overwhelmed and knocked out by the floodwaters. There was a “quite extraordinary chain reaction” he said, from what started off as a straightforward flooding emergency — bad enough in itself — into something hitting many thousands more people than those actually affected by the rising waters. For example, although 55,000 properties were flooded over the course of the summer, and about 7,000 people had to be rescued by the emergency services, once infrastructure was hit, the numbers shot up. The flooding of the Mythe water treatment works in Gloucestershire, for example, left 350,000 people without mains water supply for up to 17 days. When the Castle Meads electricity sub-station was shut down, 42,000 people were left without power in Gloucester for up to 24 hours. Some 10,000 people were trapped overnight on the M1. Five-hundred people were stranded one night on Gloucester railway station. If the Ulley reservoir dam near Rotherham had burst — and it very nearly did — something like a million people might have been without any power in the Sheffield area, a quite unprecedented situation in Britain. You would have to admit that a terrorist outrage which did that would be regarded by its perpetrators as a success.

Some say that while terrorism is a continuing threat, last summer’s sever floods were a one-off. Is this the case? Yes and no. There has certainly