New report highlights flood risks in UK

The UK has been hit by flash flooding at least 51 times since 2007 causing major disturbances to hospitals, care homes and schools new analysis has found.

The study was carried out by "Bright Blue", a think tank, and highlights increased flooding within the UK due to the climate emergency.

The data for the report was collected using a kind of artificial intelligence (Natural Language Processing) that can scan local, regional and national newspapers for incidents of flooding and disruption.

Impacts on public services, infrastructure types and business sectors including emergency services, health services, education, transport, water and sewerage are presented in the report.

Of the articles analysed in the data, a wide range of impacts were observed from manageable and discrete to life-threatening or at least highly problematic for response and recovery, community functioning or the local-to-regional economy.

Some of the impacts included:

• power cuts at fire stations;
• major disruptions to A&E departments;
• the closure of school buildings for months;
• significantly affected crop yields;
• loss of emergency call services.

The report states that "Flooding is one of the most serious climate-related risks that the UK faces. A clear understanding of how it is affecting or could affect specific key public services and critical infrastructure is fundamental to national resilience."

The report highlights 24 recommendations to the government to better prepare key public services and critical infrastructure for flooding, which fall into the broad categories of:

• better preparing key public services and critical infrastructure for flooding;
• improving community resilience to flooding;
• better supporting local government and improving urban drainage.

Helen Jackson, associate fellow at Bright Blue and the report's author, commented: "The disruption caused by Storm Arwen highlights the need to make our infrastructure resilient to extreme weather, and be more preventive and less reactive. Many towns and cities in the UK are seeing repeat episodes of flash flooding affecting households, businesses, and transport systems. We need to recognise this trend and do much more to ensure our urban drainage and sewer systems can cope with heavy rainfall as the climate changes. This should include limiting the spread of impermeable surfaces in our cities and ensuring basic measures like drain cleaning are not overlooked."