Rebeca Cruz

Flooding is a hazard; flood-related disasters are collective failures of imagination.

There’s something special about first days – the first day of school, the first day moving into a new home, the first day of a new job. They come with a mix of excitement, nervousness and curiosity – what will it be like? Until the actual day arrives, however, you can only imagine it. And for better or for worse, things rarely turn out to be exactly like we’d imagined them. Without some information or prior indication of what might be possible or likely (i.e. what to expect), imagination, as useful a tool as it often is, can only take us so far.

Our visit to Winchester Fire Station marked the first day of our CDT’s Induction – the first time we met as a cohort, and the first time we met one another. It also marked, for most of us, our first ever visit to a Fire Station. And funnily enough, as unexpected as that might be for a first visit to a fire station, we were there to talk of water, not fire.

Our hosts were Jamie Cousins, Station Commander of the station we had the privilege to visit, and Pete McClemont, Station Commander for St Mary’s Fire Station in Southampton. Both Jamie and Pete have been deeply involved with water rescue over the years – Pete leads his station’s Water & Flood Incident Manager team, and is a Swiftwater and Flood Rescue Technician (SRT); Jamie also used to be a SRT and was previously station commander of the water rescue station in Fareham.

Picture 1: Our hosts, Jamie and Pete (last and third last on the right, in uniform), and the Flood CDT’s 2024 cohort. Note that they kindly allowed a couple of us to dress up and experience the full weight of the water rescue suit!

Knowing their audience was a cohort of PhD students who, as deeply interested in flooding as we all are, had limited knowledge of the everyday realities of water rescue on the ground, Jamie and Pete patiently walked us through the intricacies and complexities of flood response in England. And the more you hear and read about it, the more fascinating it becomes. 

For instance, many of us were unaware that risk arising from different types of flooding are under the responsibility of different agencies and organisations. The Environment Agency (EA) is primarily responsible for managing the risk of flooding from “main rivers” – think of the Thames, the Severn, the Mersey, and those alike – as well as reservoirs, estuaries and the sea (The Environment Agency, 2024). Local Flood Authorities (usually unitary or county councils), in turn, have responsibility for flood risk related to surface water, groundwater and “ordinary watercourses”. For the non-technical amongst us, this means flooding arising from heavy rainfalls that overwhelm drainage and sewers (House of Commons Library, 2024).

When it comes to major flood incidents, it is the police that coordinates the emergency services’ response, while also supporting evacuation efforts where needed (Flood National Forum, 2024). In extreme cases, even the military can get involved; Storm Desmond (2015), the South Yorkshire floods (2019) and, most recently, Storm Dennis (2020) all saw the deployment of military troops to help with flood defences or help those at risk. And where do the Fire and Rescue Services – our hosts Jamie and Pete included – come into all of this, you ask? Well, they are primarily responsible for saving lives. And it’s worth noting the emphasis on lives – if property is at risk but lives are deemed not to be, this would fall outside of the Fire and Rescue services’ remit.

Confused? You’re not the only one. Although one might’ve imagined there would be a central agency, organisation or mechanism responsible for dealing with flood risk of all kinds, this is not the reality in England. And although communication amongst different organisations may have improved over the years, with the Joint Emergency Service Interoperability Programme (JESIP) playing a key role in supporting multi-agency efforts, coordination remains a challenge when flooding occurs.

Picture 2: Our cohort learning and trying out some water rescue techniques!

As difficult as effective coordination may be to achieve, however, the biggest challenge is still, ultimately, the lack of widespread public awareness of flood risk. While property and land owners are responsible for protecting their property from flooding (House of Commons, 2024), awareness of such responsibility is not widespread, and a mentality of “it’ll never happen to me” is, unfortunately, still widely prevalent (Environment Agency, 2018; Burningham et al, 2008).

This is not just an issue of destruction of property, however. Speaking with visible despair, our host Pete shared that the biggest cause behind flood-related fatalities in England comes from driving during a flooding incident. Later in the week, Sally Brown, Principal Scientist in flood risk research at the EA, pointed out that 74% of drivers admitted they would risk driving through flood water (Environment Agency, 2019). When I asked Pete and Jamie why they thought this was the case – i.e. why people would choose to do such a thing – they weren’t sure. It’s as if people simply don’t understand the risk.

This stayed with me. Why would so many people choose to risk their own lives – and the lives of those they love – like this? When Chris Skinner, a Senior Hydrologist at the EA who doubles up as a science communicator and author, got us all thinking about ‘failures of imagination’ during a separate (and incredibly fun!) Lego workshop later in the week, I wondered – were these preventable deaths and property destruction happening due to individual failures of imagination? Was it simply the case that people couldn’t imagine the worst, and so never even considered it a possibility? If so, what can we, as a society, do about it?

When Pete shared the horrific fact that most flood-related fatalities in the UK happen due to what seems to be ‘reckless’ driving behaviour, I followed up with a question to the group: what are trainee drivers being taught about driving under flood circumstances? Are they being told what to do and, more importantly, what not to do? Silence ensued. No one seemed to know whether anything was being taught.

Later in the day, when hearing that Fire and Rescue have a team specifically dedicated to training schools, my education-enthusiast-self wanted to know all about it. It turns out, they deliver several types of fire safety training to schools, and have also recently begun to train on terrorism and other major security incidents. Guess what they were not yet training on? Flooding.

This is the case even though many schools are much more likely to flood than to experience a terrorist threat. In fact, flooding is the principal environmental hazard identified in the National Risk Register and the top priority risk after a pandemic (National Risk Register, 2023). And the effects of climate change mean that the severity, frequency and consequences of flooding are only likely to get worse.

Yet, the risk of flooding, and its potentially dire and life-threatening consequences, are not only absent from the imagination of a “few” reckless drivers (who, at 74%, actually make up the vast majority of those who drive). They are absent from our collective imaginations as a society. 

Failing to educate our communities about the risks of flooding is costing us lives and properties, and causing trauma and post-traumatic stress amongst those affected. And all this may be somewhat preventable; we just need to find better ways to make flooding – and the risk associated with it – enter our collective imaginations.

Luckily for me, I get to spend the next three years working with schools and local communities to find and co-build new ways of doing so!

Rebeca Cruz