Lessons to be learnt from Louisiana

Can London plan for Floods?

Chris Vallance from Pocket Planet radio who interviewed Geoff for Tube Relief and also arranged my interview with Radio Five sent me a link to his post on the idea that London could learn a lot from the disaster in New Orleans.

"New Orleans' fate might give Londoners pause for thought, most of their city sits close to sea-level. Flooding was identified as the main reason London was categorized as a Top 10 "megarisk" city in a recent insurance company report.......

"Consider London Underground carries tens of thousands every hour and if London floods, so do the underground tunnels... and quickly too. Admittedly the risks of both a flooding tide/storm and critical (Thames) barrier damage occurring simultaneously are low, but they are not insignificant. And here we talk only about accidental damage........

"..... to be wise in hindsight is much easier than to be wise in foresight and humans just don't seem to be very good at planning for long term risks. ."

To read about what London is doing to protect us from natural designer's read the rest of Chris's post. As Londonist said: "It may all seems a little fantastical on paper, but, then again, up until this week the people of New Orleans probably thought the same thing."

London Underground; Tube Posted by annie mole Thursday, September 01, 2005 Permalink COMMENT HERE
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