Weather expert brings cold comfort on changing climate

Date Published: {J}

People should be very angry about the flooding that occurred in Galway during last November and December says geographer Kieran Hickey whose book on the subject, Deluge: Ireland’s Weather Disasters 2009-2010, is being launched in Charlie Byrne’s Bookshop in the city this Thursday night.

Nearly one year on, the horrendous rains and ensuing floods are just a memory for most of us, but “for some people these weather disasters aren’t yet over and won’t be for years to come”, according to Dr Hickey, a lecturer in climate change in NUIG.

Those are the people whose homes were built on land that was completely unsuitable for housing, but which had been developed during the golden years of the now well-dead Celtic Tiger. During last year’s torrential rains these houses flooded, causing devastation to people’s lives. And it wasn’t just in Galway. Other areas in the West and were affected and so, too, were counties in the South East, the East and South.

Kieran explains that a ferociously wet summer in 2009 was followed by a quieter September and October. But then the rains returned and there was two-day period of “savage rain” in November “which broke the camel’s back”.

The horrendously wet summer meant there was no capacity remaining in the normal water channels or on the ground, he says, so by November the water had nowhere to go.

It was a case of third time unlucky for Ireland because the previous two summers had also been extremely wet, but the autumns were relatively dry, so the worst didn’t happen.

Rain such as we experienced in Ireland last year might only occur once in a lifetime (although that’s likely to increase in the future), but it doesn’t alter the fact that many housing developments were built on flood plains and these developments had slipped through every planning net.

It was the nature of the explosion of the Celtic Tiger that councils were inundated with thousands and thousands of planning applications, from septic tanks to multi-million pound projects, says Kieran. Councils were under resourced and over worked and developers exploited that.

But, he adds, once councils had zoned land for development, the developer was already three quarters of the way to getting permission for projects anyway.

Developers by nature are risk takers, he points out. Even when some knew there might be problems in the future, they were prepared to take a calculated risk that the council would have taken their estate over before that happened.

“If an estate is taken over by a council, it becomes the council’s responsibility if it’s flooded.”

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.