The recent devastating floods in Valencia, Spain, have nothing whatsoever to do with climate change. The flooding is entirely man-made due to poor engineering and false assumptions. When designing river diversions, engineers are supposed to calculate the size of a drainage channel that would have the capacity to accommodate a one in one-hundred-year weather event. Time and again, when these normal weather events take occur it invariably proves that the assumptions made by engineers are false. Dublin’s Dundrum Town Centre was opened a mere six years when the one in one-hundred-year weather event occurred. The shopping centre flooded in 2011 proving once again that engineers or engineering textbooks must be rewritten. Alas it never happens and history repeats itself often with tragic consequences.
The cause of the shopping centre floods was the diversion of a river into pipes/culvert that were too small to carry its floodwaters. Most of the time, the river was a mere stream that ran in a deep valley. The stream drained directly from the Dublin mountains and had the capacity to take floodwaters when heavy rain fell in the mountains. Accordingly, when it was in full flood nobody took any notice, because it never rose above its high valley walls. In the early noughties, along came property developers who decided to build a road on the riverbed and divert the small river away into pipes. I’m sure they employed engineers to calculate the size of the pipe needed to carry floodwaters safely away. In any event, who ever decided on the required size of the pipe got the calculation dead wrong. It was a flood of human origin, but people were made to believe that it was the result of freaky weather.
Letterkenny hospital flooded in January 2013 causing €40m worth of damage. It, too, was caused by poor engineering, false assumptions and poor design. Again, a harmless stream became a raging torrent after heavy rain upland of the hospital. The raging torrent carried debris that in turn blocked the debris screens, so with nowhere else to go, the river burst its banks.
Despite remedial measures deployed in the aftermath of the big flood, the hospital came close to flooding again, a year later. The engineers report in the aftermath, recalculated the size of pipe that they thought would be capable of handling a once in 1,000-year flood event, even allowing for climate change. Given their inability at predicting the future, we should expect that the hospital will probably flood again in five years’ time. The report laid the blame for the flood on the design of the debris screen, and so they promised to copy the Brits when coming up with a new design. It’s a standing joke as ‘copying the British’ is what the Irish Civil Service does all the time because they lack the brain power or the even will to do a competent job.
The exact same thing happened in Valencia. They diverted a harmless looking river into a channel that was too small. Astonishingly, a 150 to a 170 meter-wide river was blocked off and converted into a public part complete with football pitches, tennis courts, running tracks and all measure of buildings.
Opened in 1986 on the old bed of the Turia River, Jardín del Turia is a magnificent facility for the people of the city. That said, the people who built the park took no heed of history. Worryingly, all sorts of warning signs were missed. First, no one asked why the people of the past found it necessary to build such a wide channel for such a small river. Second, Valencia has a history of floods that occur, sometimes every 20–40 years. The diverted river channel was supposed to stop the river flooding, but it was too small to handle naturally occurring rain events.
There are records of Valencia flooding in all these years. 1321, 1328, 1340, 1358, 1406, 1427, 1475, 1517, 1540, 1581, 1589, 1590, 1610, 1651, 1672, 1731, 1776, 1783, 1845, 1860, 1864, 1870, 1897, 1957 & 2024.
Any academic, any scientist, any TV news or climate change editor who attributes the floods in Valencia to climate change cannot distinguish between their cubitus and their derrière. Point at their elbow and ask what’s that. They will reply it is their arse, and they have two of them.
Climate change, me derrière.
EJ
Post image shows Jardín del Turia winding its way through the city of Valencia, Spain.
As always, you can check out the evidence I have used to write this article.
https://metropolismag.com/projects/how-valencia-turned-crisis-river-into-park/
Report into the cause of flooding at Letterkenny Hospital (pdf)
https://www.donegallive.ie/news/donegal-news/46924/Flood-damage–re-build-and.html
https://www.irishmirror.ie/news/irish-news/health-news/health-chiefs-were-warned-flooding-2145930
