Civil defence?

Dear Editor,

Older readers may well remember how a great deal of emphasis – not to mention millions of pounds of tax payers’ money - was invested in the UK’s Civil Defence programme during the Cold War to warn the civilian population in the event of a nuclear war.

The dreaded ‘four minute warning’, the chilling air attack warning sirens the sound of which that was even embedded in popular culture in the 1980s in, for example,  the songs of Frankie Goes to Hollywood and Hawkwind to name but a few.

I just wonder why, given the much publicised £250million pound investment in the regeneration of Rochdale, including the £50million in the new, and recently flooded council offices at Riverside, that no-one one in authority, especially those on grossly inflated salaries paid for from the public purse, appears to have had the foresight or intelligence to see to it that someone put a few thousand aside for a flood warning siren for our town centre and surrounding areas.

I may be wrong but after a chat with several neighbours none of us near the centre of Rochdale heard a flood warning siren sound.

Did anyone else hear a flood warning siren sound? I’m genuinely interested to know – and as council tax payers so too I imagine would everybody else. Especially those very many poor people who were flooded but had no insurance and may well have lost all their possessions to the rising flood waters over the last few days.

In Hebden Bridge, to cite one fairly local example, flood siren tests are embedded in the town's infrastructure and flood defence preparedness plan with regular tests being carried out throughout the year by the Council and the Flood Agency, as anyone who has ever lived in or along the Calder Valley can reliably confirm.

Sir Philip Dilley, the £100,000 a year head of the Environment Agency, fresh from his expensive jaunt to the sunny skies of his Christmas holiday toured northern England yesterday after jetting back from his holiday in Barbados – great to see he’s got his priorities right – has rightly been vilified for fiddling ‘Nero’ like while the North went under millions of gallons of rain water, sewage and industrial contaminants.

I also think that I may be correct in thinking that Rochdale Council scrapped their excellent Environmental Sustainability Team some years back as part of a cost saving exercise – would they have had some responsibility at least for developing and maintaining an up-to-date flood preparedness plan? I suspect there will be soon a growing clamour for some of these questions to be answered at some point in the future.

Today, just to play devil’s advocate for one moment, I’d like to ask through the pages of Rochdale Online should not those responsible for this shocking oversight in Rochdale Council to not sound the flood warning before the recent deluge – or worse still in what would appear to be a shocking failure in their duty of care to local people still, to even ensure that flood sirens where even in place at all - to warn the locals of imminent flooding and possible risk to life be held personally and publicly accountable?

Yours,

Andrew Wastling