Kinder's Dipwell Volunteers

Once a year Moors for the Future takes stock and monitors the depth of the water table on their restored moorland. Andrew Griffihs joins them to learn how their work on the hills can help prevent flooding in our towns and cities

- Andrew Griffihs

Flooding is in the news again. Sheffield’s rivers burst their banks and left people stranded at the Meadowhall shopping complex, and devastated people’s homes in the South Yorkshire village of Fishlake, near Doncaster. Closer to home the River Derwent became a torrent and tragically took the life of former High Sheriff Annie Hall, also causing flooding in Matlock and Belper. Further autumn flooding affected people’s homes, land and lives throughout Yorkshire and the Midlands.

Whenever such high profile flooding hits the news, the predictable baying for more active river management begins – ‘dredge the river’, ‘straighten the rivers’, ‘build walls’, ‘get the water out to sea as quickly as possible’.

But unfortunately, experience over decades has shown us that such tactics just do not work – if anything they tend to make things worse. Move the water quickly, yes, but that means that more tends to reach ‘bottlenecks’ all at the same time, and those bottlenecks are often where rivers flow through towns and cities, where people live and form communities and where the floods can do the most damage and cause the most misery.

More recent experience is teaching us that a more effective tool in our flood defence armoury is to slow down the rate at which water enters our rivers and makes its way through the river system. This can be achieved by using techniques known as Natural Flood Management (NFM), the collective aim being to ‘slow the flow’. It is a different way of thinking about how we manage our water.

It is an obvious point, but floods happen when a lot of rain falls all at once. So if we are going to manage that water better, then the place where most of it falls is a good place to start: and that is up on the top of the moors. Seventy per cent of our drinking water, for instance, comes from these hills.