Close Encounters Of The First Kind

CIB has a bijou office within 5 yards of the River Mole star of the Christmas Eve TV News bulletins. We, thanks to the way our building was built in the early 1980's - constructed on a concrete plinth and made of dense concrete block with concrete floors and constructed above the highest known flooding levels for the River Mole (1968 – the year of revolution), have escaped unscathed (bar the matter of a later edition - the electric gate). But boy was it close.

The decision to allow our building to be built so close to the river took into consideration how this little river can turn into a dirty brown beast 100 yards wide and this has to be the minimum consideration for any new development. The problem as we see it is that especially in the South East and with the Green Belt yielding up some of its territory to developers in the very near future, there will be even more pressure to build on "flood plain and low lying land". Building structure and design has to take this into consideration and an agreement on implementing initiatives like SuDS and other measures must be agreed, otherwise you know exactly what will happen. Extreme weather events will increase in both frequency and magnitude, so Planners and Housebuilders and for that matter commercial developers need to act now.

Update; I was recently interviewed by the Epsom Guardian on this very topic.