The rain came, But what went wrong?

So yesterday I took a trip out to get some food for my dog, thankfully I took my wifes 4×4 and not my two seater tincan Rover Metro. The rain came and the water rose, so much so that every road out of my tiny village was impassable in a standard car.

Meanwhile in Belfast, a greater disaster was underway, our Newly opened Westlink Underpass was in trouble. After just a few hours of rain (heavy rain) it started to fill up like a swimming pool.

A 30ft swimming pool at that! The roads service reckons it now contains some 20million gallons of water as the Clowney river overflowed into it. It is thought that it will not be reopen for Monday morning rush hour traffic. What a typical Northern Irish disaster!

First we decide to build a new road, and instead of giving the contact to the dutch who by the way would have build it for half the cost and in less time, we go local and as usual fuck it up!

Yes I agree that we had more rain that normal but we could have been in better shape to prepare for this, The road in only new and built where an underground river once ran, the first thing that should have been addressed when designing this, was flooding!

In my opinion, the roads service and the contractors need to get back to the drawing board and sort this mess out, The contractors should be made pay to fix this not the public and as for the huge bonuses paid for completing the job early… what a laugh!

Why as a country are we not prepared for rough weather, most of our sewage systems have not been upgraded since the 1930s and know one seems to fully in charge of ‘flooding’ its seems to be a joint effort between the roads agency, the DOE, fire service, Water service and the rivers agency to clear up and assign the blame to every one else, Why is there not one central agency to deal with this?

Last week when I was at the 100 year Celebration of Scouting in Ireland, we had to put evacuation procedures into place when the site where 12,000 Scouts where camping flooded badly due to an unforcasted amount of rainfall. During this evacuation I got to spend some time working closely with the Irish Civil Defence a voulenteer organisation of 6000 people trained to act quickly and cope with national disaster such as flooding, air raid and nuclear attacks.

After further researching the Civil Defence, they are a fantastic organisation and in fact operation not only in Ireland but make up a world wide organisation of people committed in protect thier local enviroment in times of disaster.

People like this exist in Northern Ireland, but they are infact not past of organisation but just merly looking out for thier neighbours, Like the four farmers than took to there tractors yesterday evening and closed the airport road for fears of people getting stranded in the floods. However altho they where simply looking out for the good of mankind, by closing the road, floods or not they where breaking the law. I think we in Northern Ireland need to get real and look at how things are run in Ireland, now that we dont have the hugh resorces of the British Military at hand some restructuring in much needed. I like the civil defence, what they stand for and how they operate. We need something like this! Now!