Designing with flooding in mind - Home, land and people.

After a solitary month of droughts – the rains have fell heavily on Britain throughout the spring, summer and early autumn; with a brief reprieve in mid-winter before the heavens opened again  and caused some of the most significant damage of the entire raining year.

Insurance companies attempted to back out of payments on policy technicalities, houses being demolished by rain, or earmarked to be demolished as the foundations too frail or the building inevitably will collapse. Although it was predictable that Global Warming was cited as the reason for these terrible floods – the triage of damage control is re-housing those who have lost homes, get funds (Government, Insurance, private) to support these decimated communities with the intermediate focus then being on rebuilding the lost homes.

What do we do now? Build on stilts in vulnerable flooding areas? Why wasn’t this practice adhered to twenty years ago when insurance companies back then were warning [the public, industry and the Government] against insuring in areas that could become flooded with global warming/increased sea levels etc.

Perhaps a combination of efforts could be the solution for better practice against floods (and droughts!) and damage control for when future floods (albeit possibly reduced ones) still hit our communities.

Build on stilts:

The only way is up? If we built our homes, so that the ground floor (and basement) would be enforced yet also sacrificial so that integrity of the remainder of the houses were unaffected then we would have less a chance of losing our precious homes. If the soils/foundations were better enforced, had naturally stronger resilience to soil properties compromise and street design was planned in an appropriate format to channel excess water away from the houses, streets and farmlands and into the water systems (or absorption factors like soakways, water collection butts etc) then our homes would be better protected.

Although the stilts would not be seen as hidden within the homes/office building walls; the overall structure would be sound in the event of a harsh flood – if the ground floor is destroyed the rest of the house will remain intact.

Going off on a slight tangent – with floods hitting our agricultural systems, would Vertical Farming be one format to reduce impacts and still keep the farms working whilst the flatlands/rolling hills are recovering from flood damage?

More natural soakways:

More gardens in future planning and design of houses and communities would help support more rain absorption, a comprehensive planting programme: planting more trees and wildflowers adding one billion additional indigenous seedlings will really help combat flooding strikes.

Soil conditioning:

Conditioning? Soil can’t be any richer can it? What if a few billion worms were added to the soils at tens of thousands of points across the country? Implementing more active wormeries functioning on a community level would improve out soils properties and condition the soils to support more growth of grasses, flowers and trees to ensure a healthier water cycle is as efficient as possible.

Rain Water collection and Natural Soakways:

Installing a water butt/rainwater barrel may be an obvious issue, yet people only contemplate it when floods are in the news, or droughts have caused us discomfort. The issue of plastic water butts does raise the issue of depleting our oil reserves more - unless you can source all the plastic materials from recycled sources.

The most low embodied and practical option is more grass areas/spaces. Many design principles and planning practices of decades before have eradicated the front/rear garden adjacent to houses; so Britain lost so much more green space and water absorbing properties.

Natural soakways of digging down one metre into the ground and adding rocks before covering it all with soil will help absorb [some] rainwater yet all these token measures when executed by thousands of people will significantly reduce localised/national flooding impacts.

In previous blogs, Davius has explained the basic figures for how many millions of tons of waters/litres ofwaters can be taken out of the flooding equation by simply installing one water butt in every household.

We can all make this happen – it does not necessarily have to expensive to create ‘natural soakways’: a spade, some rocks/stones/bricks from skips. It costs £50 for a decent water butt/rainwater barrel (which sensible people can save £1 a week for a year to implement!) the planting initiaitves which are already happening on a global level by many small pockets of people can easily be expanded, with more locals getting involved spreading the plant seedlings around their districts to increase water retention via plants (which doubles as a biodiversity support mechanism for threatened/declining important species of bees, butterflies and other beneficial insects/birds etc.)

Now what?

You set the example by doing one thing – a few of your neighbours will follow suit. It is understandable that humans only react when threatened, as opposed to plan out for all disasters (which is a little paranoid) as a source of good practice. The flooding warnings are coming at a sharper rate over the last twenty years; we should all try and do something about it now! Get digging, planting and barrelling folks !!

Dreaded Droughts, Furious Floods, the Humble Home and You.

In the UK we have largely ignored the drought warnings until they affect us directly. In an era where global warming was starting to gain more recognition in the 1970’s and 1980’s – when fear of drought hitting many countries in the richer northern hemisphere when in fact we have been hit by quite the reverse and suffered some terrible floods, nationally and internationally, with serious repercussions of many deaths, billions (currency) in damages and communities decimated.

Many people feel helpless and therefore ignore the potential flooding problems. Many people have no faith or trust that something can be done about floods and droughts. This is only natural human reaction in this day and age, as we feel microscopic in the face of 7 billion inhabitants. So perhaps a different perspective is offered through voluntary efforts, building control and planning initiatives. Small steps do have significant knock on effect and we can make strong steps individually and as a nationwide collective.

For all the problems we suffer in UK with flooding – make no mistake they could have been significantly worse. Due to the past efforts of thousands of people planting trees (We all know that symbiosis between trees and soils helps reduce flooding) and installing rain (water collection) butts the flooding risks have been reduced somewhat. We can all take this further forward! In hte UK there are over 200 000 homes who are at risk of not being able to get house/flood insurance due to being in high risk flood areas. With a national policy of water containment/re-use implemented we can help all these people and their homes.

The majority of UK, on a domestic level, do make a concerted effort to turn dripping taps off, have showers instead of baths, many believe their dishwashers use less water than cleaning dishes in the sink. Yet as opposed to just ‘water-saving’ perhaps we should additionally look at ‘water retention’.

Just to go slightly off topic …. Regardless of heating source – hot water will remain in the pipes until it is demanded again. If ALL hot water pipes in industry and domestic were super lagged/insulated – we would save millions of litres of water and millions of Megawatts of energy for heating, as there would be less time waiting for the water to heat up (the still water in the pipes having lost its heat as it has permeated through the un-insulated pipes) the taps are run continually before it is an acceptable warmth level to the end user.

This is very evident of people who rely upon older combi-boilers which heat up the water when you turn the taps on….. it does take a long time for the water to heat up, so when you are waiting for water to get hotter for sinks or showers – on a national scale (the 30-60 seconds we are waiting for the water to heat up) this results in millions of litres of water being utterly wasted. New regulations have demanded improvements in new combi-boiler efficiencies – so that is a positive step forward.

High demand households such as shared accommodation, offices, kitchens etc. prefer the combi-boiler performance to guarantee heat demands so it would be a prudent measure to be able to access high demand immediate heated water technologies. Are wood burners or micro-generation our best options for more sustainable heating systems?

Back onto the main topic of water retention: The media will relay to the public when impending droughts will result in lower reservoir levels, the expected hosepipe bans – thus reporting to us the impact upon agriculture and therefore the impact upon us insuccessive years, yet too many times we feel helpless and do nothing.

As we are driven towards becoming more innovative in our own households, an interest in allotments has grown again since the turn of the century. People are finding ways of saving home resources and money to become less reliant upon the existing system in these times of really bad economic times.

This is not just about drought, there is the other extreme of flooding – we have nothing, then there is too much. Many believe flooding occurs as a result of poor land management where so many thousands of trees, hedgerows have been removed, thus the soil loses its properties and nutrients to retain water and distribute evenly.

Supporting organisations like the woodland trust, or organic farms will go some way to reinvigorating soil properties and reducing flooding problems. Yet a national scale of policy implementation will be required to really support and re-establish natural ecological processes that have naturally dealt with minimizing flooding and drought.

What we can do though is relatively easy. Please consider this small step and it’s massive collective positive impact. Use any search engine and it will tell you we have approximately 30 millionhouses in the UK. Basic statistics state that in England and Wales we have 22.5 million houses Scotland and Northern Ireland easily take us past 30 million in housing stock numbers.

So what?

30 million houses with a 40 litre Rainwater butt will collect: 1 200 000 000 (1.2 billion) litres of water.

30 million houses with a 100 litre Rainwater butt will collect 3 000 000 000 (3 billion) litre of water.

A couple of billion litres of flood water, left uncollected, could wreak enough havoc in any town/city – enough to warrant attention to further flood reductions methods. How unrealistic is this? If every building in UK could hold an additional 100 litres of [rain] water in storage – this would drastically reduce flooding AND offer us a free water resource in periods of severe drought like the UK suffered in April 2011.

A 100 litre capacity water butt or water container would be approximately 2 metres high and half a metre wide in diameter – so could comfortably be placed on the back wall of majority of houses adjacent to the guttering.

The balance is assured. With such a national combined prolific level of water storage, the UK could be better prepared for further droughts and floods to come.

What can you do?