The place name Annaghmore comes from the Irish eanach mor — a great marsh. The townland northwest of Bandon, Co Cork, is well named. The Ordnance Survey map has designated it as “liable to flood”.
Seven years ago, at the height of the boom, O’Flynn Construction decided it would be the perfect location for a new town. It proposed building homes for about 5,000 people, and facilities for 4,500 workers. A housing and employment hub, they called it. There would be factories, a business park, sports and leisure facilities. Hundreds of construction jobs would be created. Despite protests from people in Bandon, some Fianna Fail councillors thought it a great idea.
“The area from Annaghmore to Carrigaline is prone to flooding,” said Kevin Murphy, a Fine Gael councillor who opposed the plan. “I can remember it flooding many times in the past 30 or 40 years after heavy rain. So a development there was totally inappropriate. It would have been crazy to rezone it given its history. Common sense prevailed eventually.”
Last week the flood plain of Annaghmore was submerged. Where the houses and the factories, the church and the leisure centre would have been, 50mm of rain fell in a day. “You can’t see the land — it’s totally covered in water,” said Rachel McCarthy, a Bandon councillor.
When McCarthy was young, there was a marshy spot above Bandon known locally as “the bog”. When the town flooded — as it did in 1916, 1975 and 1986 — this was its flood plain, helping to absorb some of the swell. A shopping centre was built on it in 1997.
Bob Dean, a businessman, was among those who objected. “People realised then what was going to happen,” he said. “They were saying, ‘We’ll suffer for this yet.’ It took 12 years.”
The waters started rising at 11.30am on Thursday, November 19. For a while the retailers on South Main Street weren’t worried — they were accustomed to it coming up a foot or two. “We started lifting stuff up one level in the shop,” said Dean, who runs a hardware store. “Then we realised it was coming further, so we went up another level, and we ended up lifting, lifting, lifting. At the back of my shop, the water was eight feet high. It came in our back door and out the front. Six inches of water flowed out of our front door for eight hours.
“The main street was a river. It rose so fast that shopkeepers weren’t able to get their stuff up high enough. The town is devastated. Shop after shop is nothing but four walls. To hear windows exploding and coming out on the street, and to see stock coming out after it, that was a very sad sight.”
For Dean and many other townspeople, the disappearance of the flood plain was a factor in the unprecedented destruction. The land that had absorbed the overspill, and leached it back slowly into the river over several weeks, is now hard surface. The rain bounces off the concrete and the Tarmac, and swirls straight into the swelling river.
On the opposite bank of the Bandon from the shopping centre is a new Cluid housing development for over-55s. It’s been open for only a few weeks, yet it also flooded 10 days ago. “The water came up the toilets and sinks and destroyed people’s apartments,” said McCarthy. “It’s up to each individual to insure their own flat, and, given that they’ve been living there only a short time, they wouldn’t have done it. I wonder who gave the planning for that. Clearly it’s bananas.
“The feeling in the town is that had the shopping centre not been there, the bog would have taken maybe a third of the water. Instead, when the river overflowed, it had nowhere to go except down the town.”
So who allowed all this building on flood plains? Councillors, right? Not always, says Kevin Murphy. He points out that Cork County Hall, the headquarters of the county council, was built on marshland in the 1960s and extended eight years ago, including a basement at the level of the River Lee. Ten days ago, the inevitable happened — the basement flooded.
“A brand-new library, which was due to open on the Friday, was ripped asunder,” Murphy said. “The architects and engineers made a hames of it. Books and archival material have been lost, equipment possibly costing millions.
“Installing a basement was madness, and I was one of 14 councillors who opposed this redesign. The chickens came home to roost last week. If you build on the same level as the river, there’s only one place the water can go. There’s been seriously bad planning. Surely now we have learnt a lesson.”
Asked whether the shopping centre and Cluid housing complex in Bandon were unwise, Cork county council replied, “Upstream of Cork city, we do not consider that any development [we] permitted impinges on the flood plain.” But then Bandon is not “upstream” of Cork city, which is on the Lee.
“In relation to County Hall, the city is built within a flood plain and the issue for the future — against the background of apparently increasing severity of weather events — is the need to put in place the correct defences,” the council said.
All over the country last week, there was a similar sense of stable doors being bolted. Recently built houses and estates in Clare, Galway and the midlands were swamped by the record rainfall. Development on flood plains was blamed for flooding as far apart as Carlow and Carrick-on-Shannon.
In Ennis, Co Clare, hundreds of acres of land zoned for development was under water. Eamon Traynor, who lives on the Tulla Road in the town, was one of those forced out of his home. He’d put everything up on blocks, but the wooden floors have been destroyed and a bathroom installed two weeks ago will have to come out.
Two housing estates were built near his home, even though the fields near the Fergus had been flooded to a depth of six feet not long before. “Before they started building, I had aerial photographs done and I sent them in with a letter to An Bord Pleanala,” Traynor told The Clare Champion.
They built new houses anyway, although Traynor noticed the floor levels were set higher than his own. They must have suspected what was coming.
Few others did. Kieran Hickey, a climatologist and lecturer in geography at NUI Galway, says the epic floods in the south and west have stress-tested the planning system for climate change. “And we have been found wanting,” he said. “At best we get a D+ or a C-. Not many developers factored in the spare capacity you need for climate change.”
During the boom years, those who opposed development, even on flood plains, were characterised as being against economic progress. “The pressure came not just from councillors, but from people who wanted to see property prices going up,” said Hickey. “I think some of what slunk through the back door we’re going to regret. There will be places we will conclude are not habitable. We do have excess housing stock now, so the time is right to move people. In Athlone they are talking about moving council tenants to other houses. We can’t leave people in a vulnerable position.”
Climate change is happening faster than scientists predicted, especially in terms of rainfall. Once in a century rain events seem to happen every few years now. This month alone, rainfall records in Kerry and Galway, two of Ireland’s wettest counties, were broken, with something to spare. The consensus is growing: there can be no more building on flood plains.
Draft planning guidelines stating this will be formally published by the Department of the Environment tomorrow. A spokesman for the department said John Gormley, the minister, intends to enact legislation to make the guidelines binding. “They should have and will have the effect of preventing construction of large-scale developments on flood plains,” he said.
The next problem is to decide where the flood plains are and how to define them. What is the risk — once a decade, or once a century? The Office of Public Works (OPW) is drawing up maps and posting them online (floodmaps.ie
<http://floodmaps.ie/> ). The process will take several more years but then, as politicians and planners noted almost with relief last week, it’ll take several years for the construction industry to recover as well.
After the worst flooding since 1986, the search for answers and solutions has roamed widely. “We’re all grasping at straws trying to understand this,” said Hickey. “Rivers should be dredged regularly but haven’t been for 30 or 40 years. That was a contributory factor in some places.” So were blocked drains, and the fact that, freakishly, the weather system on November 19 parked itself over Ireland for more than 24 hours. Usually, high winds accompany heavy rainfall and whip the rain clouds onwards.
The lack of broad-leaved trees on hillsides has been blamed too, although there have been no large deciduous forests in Ireland since the 16th century.
The proliferation of concrete and hard surfaces is another consideration. “Except where necessary to avoid pollution, we should stop laying Tarmac on everything,” said Martin Mansergh, the minister in charge of the OPW, last week. It’s been said before, but you feel the message is sinking in now.
With a Green party minister at the Department of the Environment, and a long interval before more housing estates are built, Ireland now has a chance to plan for a climate-changed future. The question is how drastic the action should be.
“We will have to abandon some areas,” says Tony Lowes, a spokesman for Friends of the Irish Environment. “You can’t maintain viability in some places. Houses won’t get insurance. The idea that you can just put up more flood walls is no good. It’s going to get worse; the public don’t realise that. The rate of sea level rises is too high and the changes in rainfall too great.
“We now have our own refugees from global warming.”
John Burns
(c) The Sunday Times
November 29, 2009