Getting your feet wet in Britain

From the London Telegraph:

The watery grave that lies in wait
Notice something remarkable about many of the pictures of this week�s devastating floods? They showed the foul brown waters swamping recently built housing. Indeed, if that did not seem strange, it may be because it has become all too common: after the record 2007 floods, for example, the Environment Agency reported that most houses affected were relatively new.

Yet, whereas trouble might be expected in ancient river-girt settlements such as Tewkesbury, Malmesbury or York � where the King�s Arms pub, under water again this week, records the level of repeated floods in its bar � wouldn�t it be reasonable to assume that modern estates would be designed to escape it?

Reasonable, maybe � but certainly not right. Half of all the houses built in Britain since the Second World War, covering an area the size of the West Midlands, have been flung up on land vulnerable to flooding, with councils and ministers often dismissing official warnings.

Indeed building on the flood plains that make up 12 per cent of England is still growing almost twice as fast as elsewhere. And if the hyperactive new planning minister Nick Boles � who this week advocated spreading new housing over open countryside two and a half times the size of Greater London � has his way, things will get very much worse.

More:

Ministers� planning policies look like making things worse. Take what is happening in the village of Feniton, near Honiton in Devon, which was flooded again this week � as it was this summer and in 2008 � after water spilled from a nearby field. Work is about to start on building 50 houses in that same field, after the Government�s Planning Inspectorate overruled both the East Devon district council and the local development plan to give it the go-ahead.

The council confirms that no flood defences are in prospect and, though it says the developer has given assurances that it will not make things worse, local people don�t agree. But the inspector swept away all objections in favour of a provision in the new National Planning Policy Framework that enough land must be made available for housing.

The joys of centralized planning. South of here, the Skagit River used to flood regularly -- they built some levees to stop it but you see the old farmhouses built with the first floor ten feet off the ground level. To build on a flood plain with no protection is nuts...