The first time this hit a week or two ago our patio "flooded" to about 4 or 5 cm deep in water alarmingly quickly. I grabbed a broom and jiggled around the drain to remove some leaves/twigs/mud and it cleared within 30 seconds. Today, no flood on our patio<p>I wonder what the state of the drains are in most of London's streets considering the recent lack of basic services due to covid... This is not exactly new - its not like we don't get rain in London so I am surprised this is happening quite so frequently<p>It would not surprise me to hear that basic street cleaning has been totally neglected for the past 18 months
When I was living in London back in 1999, one of my friends was working on the Jubilee Line Extension (JLE) project, which was extending the tube/underground out to the east.<p>He told me that the bilge pumps running in many parts of the London underground are running 24/7, simply because the water table is so high (and the underground is <i>very</i> deep in some places). During <i>normal</i> weather, if those pumps go offline for more than <i>15 minutes</i> they have a major flooding problem. Doubtless that situation has worsened over the past two decades.<p>London is very flat and very low -- they're going to be an unfortunate poster child for coastal cities being slowly but inexorably wiped out by sea level rise.
This is the second time in a few weeks that there has been unprecedented surface water (rain, not river) induced flooding in many parts of London. An NYT article from 13th July:<p><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/13/world/europe/uk-london-floods.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/13/world/europe/uk-london-fl...</a>
Second time in under 2 weeks[0]. I wonder how much of this is related to people having paved over their lawns and gardens.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-57811613" rel="nofollow">https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-57811613</a> from 12 July
If drones can encourage rain, could they be used to delay rain or spread it out over a longer time? <a href="https://interestingengineering.com/the-uae-is-using-drones-to-control-dubais-weather" rel="nofollow">https://interestingengineering.com/the-uae-is-using-drones-t...</a><p><i>> rain-controlling drones engineered by the University of Reading. The drones don't create rain themselves but help to jump-start rain production via cloud seeding. They "zap" the clouds with an electric charge, subsequently charging the droplets inside. Since the beginning of 2021, the National Center of Meteorology (NCM) has conducted 126 instances of cloud seeding.</i>
Remarkable how fast the climate can change: <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-17373803" rel="nofollow">https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-17373803</a>