‘The Environment Agency are lions, but they’re led by donkeys’
It may well be unparliamentary language, it may not raise the tone of public debate – but it does adequately convey the scale of local anger over the floods.
Local MP Ian Liddell Grainger is incandescent at the EA bosses – Chris Smith in particular – and he told me that he wants the world to know this:
“Chris Smith is an arse and he should just go,” he says, talking on the banks of the River Parrett in Bridgwater, “the EA here on the ground are lions but they’re led by donkeys.”
He went on, this time on camera: “the biggest ass of all is Chris Smith at the very top, what we’re furious here with are these damned people in London who couldn’t give a stuff about my constituents or anyone else.”
We are of course putting that to Chris Smith if we can find him.
Grainger also says the RSPB needed to be brought kicking and screaming to agree that local rivers here must be dredged as they used to be.
The RSPB deny that and live on last night’s programme were keen to put the people first – birds second priority list. The simple fact is that a bird reserve under several feet of water is not much use to wading birds any more than for people seems to have been recognised by all.
So the dredging battle is won and the whole story today moves on to the Severn Estuary.
Right now the rain is teeming down; the run-off from saturated land intense; westerly gales are strengthening and spring tides building.
Alas, it will be in darkness tonight I’m told, but tomorrow morning’s spring tide Severn Bore will be something to behold – something else to surf!
Down the estuary at Bridgwater Swedish flood defences are in place in vulnerable areas:
“They’re much quicker to put up than lines of sandbags which you have to fill and then you are left with bags of contaminated sand,” says Britt Warg, a modern languages teacher who took an accidental turn and is now a flood defence consultant.
We’ll be in position – live – this evening at 6.30 to see how the simple Swedish defence wall is faring as the tide rises – it has already prevented an inundation of this street at dawn today.