Against the Flow

An article in the paper about water. Our privatised water companies have hatched a plan to pump water from the Severn/Avon catchment into the Thames catchment, in order to address the chronic water shortage in England's south-east. To compensate for some of the water lost in the Severn/Avon, the plan also includes moving water out of the Trent catchment into the Avon. This scheme has not really hit the mainstream news

This kind of large-scale movement of water sounds to me as if it is likely to have all sorts of unforeseen consequences, changing water flows and levels across large parts of the country, mixing up different water chemistries, altering complex environments in so many different ways across so wide an area that it is impossible to fully assess the risks involved

The 'simple' solutions that might make a difference with much lower risk seem to be getting much less attention - perhaps because they are much less exciting to some managers than large-scale civil engineering. Basic measures that would make a difference include: incentives to cut usage (we are apparently one of the most wasteful counties in Europe); controling and regulating abstraction (we barely do either); reducing leakage (there are no effective financial incentives on the companies to do so); keeping water in the catchment - in ground water, flood meadows, woodland and wetlands, rather than containing it in river channels and discharging it to the sea as soon as possible; and finally, building some reservoirs

After weeks of dry weather, we have finally had some rain - talk of drought has receded for now. It seems only a few days since I closed the taps on these water butts, and this one is already full, despite being only fed by the runoff from a few square metres of green roof

This water is safely in the Thames watershed. A couple of kilometers north or west and it would have found itself in the Avon and much less useful. Up here, it seems such a small thing to be on one side of the hill or the other

The scruffy flap on the lid is my Heath-Robinson experiment to try to discourage insects from laying their eggs in the water. Last year we had quite a population of water-borne lavae in the butt, which was not entirely pleasant. I'll be adding a big arrow and a sign reading "pond"