10:00am Wednesday 9th January 2013
HAVING seen in the Oxford Mail at least twice last year the flooding in the city and county, my mind went back three years to a holiday in Canada.
On our two-day coach trip through the Rockies in April, we saw vast amounts of snow, in places six to seven-feet deep. Near Banff, our tour manager informed us: “The glacier on the mountain at the far end of the lake is 500 feet thick and will be gone in a month’s time as will the snow.”
Now you don’t have to be an expert in meteorology to work out that countless mountains with ice 500-feet thick and vast areas of snow up to seven-feet deep are going to create copious amounts of melt water when the temperature starts to rise. But you do not read in the papers or see on the TV news that Canada has problems with flooding, so how do they disperse all this melt water without causing misery to the population, the like of which we have seen in the city and county?
Also, the roads were clear and traffic flowing normally.
So here is my suggestion. Representatives from the Environment Agency and Highways Agency go on a fact-finding mission to Canada to get answers, one of which I am sure will be – ‘Because we don’t build houses or industrial estates on land that we believe will be prone to flooding’. I am sure those residents of the county most affected by the flooding will agree with this suggestion. Who knows? They may even find the answer to the problem.
The Environment Agency has known for some time, as we all have, that climate change was inevitable and I am sure that the EA would also have been told the effect it would have. Yet they appear to have had no plan of action in place to combat it and constantly made excuses and did nothing.
And to our Highways Agency – if Canada can deal with seven-feet of snow and keep traffic moving, six inches should be a piece of cake.
RAY HOLTON, Kingsclere Road, Bicester
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