Jubilee River bank failure and helicopter used to repair – AI report and more

MVI_7126

Moving bags of stone

(Bank repair after 2024 failure – awaiting image!)

There are reports of yet another Jubilee River bank and/or bed problem.  After £100m expenditure over twenty years ago – the JR still repeatedly dumps manually (EA) controlled Thames flood water onto my patch and this year (2024) we flooded for the fourth time this century.  Sub-standard in concept, design and construction it is time for the EA to be both honest and accountable.

 

(Awaiting image of 2024 bank repair)

Today – my view is that the EA is behaving just like the Post Office.  The cultural shortcomings need identifying and fixing.  I look forward to introduction of the proposed ‘duty of candour’ legislation.

“Indeed, this is only happening because the EA bet its tawdry soul (and the lives of so many of us, on its blatant, hydrologically nonsensical lie of 1996 – “that rivers do self-dredge” (whatever that was supposed to mean).  “That picture illustrates exactly what happens if and when a river “self-dredges” itself.  It destroys lives and businesses, makes insurance impossible and spreads across the land, into our homes and then into our airways the very stuff that it was so furtively concerned about allowing its now-departed dredging teams to handle.

One reason for the EA’s implausible claim of self-dredging lies in the historic (and possibly continuing) discharges of radioactive materials into water courses close to Harwell and Aldermaston, referred to in this contemporary document:
http://www.fraw.org.uk/…/radioactive_substances_in_se.pdf
[link not working?] and I would draw attention to the 2 paragraphs on p4 beginning with “The future of Harwell at …” So lightly radio-active wet silt (even if at low activity levels) is distributed by flood flows into our homes, gardens and surroundings,
where it dries into fine dust and passes thence into our lungs and bloodstream. Well, you wouldn’t want your workforce handling that sort of stuff, would you? Unfortunately, it is by deliberately ceasing river maintenance and thus leaving the rivers to clog in places and erode in others that we get these recent and repeated floods, which bring ashore this finest of silt, with its vast surface area per gramme, onto which
such undesirable radio-nucleides so readily adsorb.
“As for how much surface we are to expect from fine river silt, this has been shown to be in the region of 22 square metres per gramme of silt – see:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/…/abs/pii/S0883292710001356  [Link not working?] or comparison, the area of an Association Football field is about 7000 square metres, so the particles in just 0.32kg of river silt would be likely to have the same total surface area as a Premier League pitch. It is onto that surface, and particularly onto the corners and edges of those ultra-fine silt dust particles, which have high levels of affinity for these materials that unwelcome substances discharged into our rivers
over several decades (including all the things we really don’t need to inhale), can and do so readily attach themselves.”

More to follow later