flooding
The recent flooding has spread to county Kildare, namely to Sallins, a commuter town for Dublin, flooded since yesterday. Imagine, being flooded for one day. On frontline tonight there was a lady from Sallins heckling the minister for the environment, John Gormley about who might come to pump the water out of the development she lives in. Get in line lady, the water in Galway and Athlone and lots of other places has been flooding houses for a lot longer than the water in Sallins. Ten days, five days, e.t.c.
Worse than that though was the lady with rectangular specs complaining that no one told her that the apartment she bought was built on a flood plain. Pat Kenny added fuel to the “who is going to compensate these people for where they bought their properties that will be uninsurable and unsaleable.” Give me a break. Who is going to compensate these people? Compensate them for what? For being complete idiots? It’s bad that councillors rezoned flood plains for development. It’s terrible that planning authorities granted planning permission, but, what is even worse is that people bought apartments and houses in these low lying developments, near to rivers and that they did so without looking at rivers on OS maps and flood data that the OPW has been compiling for years, or talking to local farmers and local townspeople and village people who remember what used to happen to the field that now houses a development, or local newspaper archives to see what sort of flood history the towns had, or the field next to the development after bouts of heavy rain to see what sort of water logged state the field was in. It doesn’t take that much digging to figure out floodplains.
These latest floods have reached new areas, there is more flooding and deeper water for certain, but that doesn’t excuse buying properties recklessly without any consideration for the history of the area, or indeed the future development of the area. You see the same issue when people buy a property and later discover a road is going to be built near them, a road that was planned twenty years ago but one they didn’t take the time to make themselves aware of. Or people that bought in villages that used to have a population of a few hundred or maybe a thousand and one local school, that became subject to the development of hundreds of new houses, these people knowing that hundreds of new houses were built in a short time frame were the very ones to scream when their child was turned away from the local school in a old building with a handful of classrooms. Again - no research. The problems of the developments of the noughties are so predictable. School places, poor transport links, poor water works, poor roads, traffic jams, and now, flooding. Every single problem a predictable one ignored in the rush to own a property or five.
I have sympathy for farmers whose farms are under meters of water, I have sympathy for people who were flooded because new flood defences up stream sent water directly to their door, but sympathy for people who purchased on a flood plain because they didn’t do any research, those people I have no sympathy for really. That makes me a bit heartless I suppose. Yes, I am heartless to people who choose to keep themselves in the dark and choose to put their heads in the sand. I feel terribly sorry that they have in some cases lost everything in their home, but I don’t feel sympathy for their pleas for compensation or their belief that it is someone else’s fault. It’s the same old chesnut. No one put a gun to anyone’s head and made them buy the property that they bought. It was a choice. Made freely.
I used to live in a development on the Dodder. It was high above the Dodder and SK and I used to joke that it would take a flood of biblical proportions to actually flood this apartment complex. But, biblical flood proportions notwithstanding, this was a sensible development. It was built on stilts. A few hundred meters down stream and at a slightly lower level were some cottages that did flood one winter that we lived there. Despite the fact that they were also raised off the ground and had a “stoop” up to the front door. The apartment block was a sensible development. It had the benefit of a glorious riverside setting but it was defended from the threat of huge volumes of water. If there is ever a flood there, only a car park will be affected and the main entrance hall. But people’s apartments will be fine. Did the developer make money? You bet that they did, but anyone with sense would have thought twice about a ground floor apartment, which is probably why none were built. The Dodder has a flooding history. And ground floor apartments below the level of bridges would have been a terrible idea.
