Long after the clean-up has finished, the musty, damp smell lingers. Being flooded is a particular kind of hell which begins with a crushing moment of realisation: the sandbags and scrunched-up towels shoved along the front door won’t make a jot of difference. Nature is unstoppable.
The next panic comes when your floor turns into a lake and you rush to lift your things on to tables and cupboards. The water seeps in everywhere – through doors, between the skirting boards, in gaps you didn’t know existed.
The final torment is saved for the next day, when the waters have receded and you’re left with a soaking, stinking mess which will cost you thousands, because your insurance stopped covering flood damage the last time this happened.
I’m fortunate to own a home but it has a wet history, and many floods have hit us. The last flood, in October 2011, was so severe that within minutes water was pouring into the electrical sockets a few feet up the wall. We bucketed the water out the window in a pitiful attempt to show some fight but it was futile. The force of the flow was beyond anything we could influence.
Our last flood was so severe that within minutes water was pouring into the electrical sockets a few feet up the wall
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Nobody died, so we just got on with it, but there’s no doubt that the experience of flooding leaves you with a potent mix of emotions. It’s exhausting and upsetting to fight it and clean up afterwards. You feel relieved if nobody is hurt; if someone is injured, it’s gut-wrenching. You’re grateful to neighbours for helping (flooding has an uncanny way of bringing people together) but you’re left worrying that it’ll happen again. Whether justified or not, you feel a sense of outrage that the powers that be didn’t do enough to prevent it in the first place.
These feelings hit me last October while listening to locals describe the events around Storm Babet, which caused Midleton in Co Cork to flood. One local described how he was having a coffee one minute and the next the town was knee-deep in flood water. The deluge of more than a month’s worth of rain in just 48 hours turned the main street into a river.
As global temperatures increase, the atmosphere’s potential to store water, which falls as rain, also increases. Our oceans are warming to record temperatures – in the summer of 2023, waters off the coast of Florida were warmer than a hot tub – and with that, more moisture evaporates.
Thanks to scientists in Maynooth University, we now know that the climate crisis made the extreme rainfall which fell on Midleton last year “more likely and more intense”. Alarmingly, had the floods occurred during high tide, the flooding could have been much worse. As Maynooth climatologist Peter Thorne put it: “The ocean was Midleton’s very best friend on the day.” He added that the event was “simply a foretaste of what is to come”.
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Within days some Cork politicians called for reinforced concrete to be put on the sides of the Owenacurra river to keep the water at bay. The instinct to pour concrete to defend ourselves against nature is understandable; each time I flooded, I immediately wanted a wall to be built to funnel the water away. But these solutions are expensive, need constant costly maintenance and often end up increasing the likelihood of flash floods. We like to think we can control water with concrete; we can’t.
Instead, hard engineering needs to become a smaller part of a much bigger picture, which involves taking a wider view of the flood-prone area. Zooming out, it encompasses the surrounding urban areas and, further afield, the expanse of farmland and upland areas. On these lands we need to find ways to increase the Earth’s “soakability” so that when a torrent of rain falls the water finds its way down, not across, the surface of the Earth.
A few months ago, I visited a farm in Ballygow, south of Wexford, where geographer Mary Bourke of Trinity College Dublin is working with her sister and brother-in-law, beef and sheep farmers Caroline and Patrick Gleeson, on an experimental project to find cheap, nature-based solutions to reduce the impacts of flash floods downstream by re-meandering rivers, installing leaky dams and creating flood storage zones.
We stood in a stream in the corner of a field where Mary had placed a long tree trunk where the flood water naturally entered the field; the log didn’t stop the water, it just slowed the flow. Further downstream she designed a soil embankment, known as a “bund”, which holds the water in the field slightly longer than normal before it re-enters the stream. Data monitors record the water levels every few minutes, which could serve as a warning system for the wider community.
These small-scale experiments are cost-effective to install, although we have no scheme currently in Ireland to pay landowners to slow the flow. Incentivising farmers to sow diverse grass species in their fields can increase the soakage of the land (in a project in the UK, these grass mixes can store up to five times more water than intensively managed grasslands). Large-scale bog restoration in upland areas demonstrably retains water and prevents downstream flooding.
In urban areas, the cheap alternative to hard engineering is to green-up and de-pave. This “Sponge City” concept, invented by Chinese architect Kongjian Yu, involves turning our backs on concrete and steel in favour of trees, lakes, green roofs, and permeable pavements. The financial case for this approach is compelling: Wuhan’s sponge city programme saved the city about US$600 million compared to a concrete-based alternative.
Only the foolhardy would reject all hard-engineering solutions. But using nature-based solutions to soften our landscape, helping it soak up more water and slow the flow, should be the starting point of any flood mitigation scheme. The Midleton floods are the clearest indication yet that we face increasingly dangerous flood risks; the cheapest and most effective way is to work with nature to reduce our exposure to what’s ahead. It’s a hopeful prospect.