have the emergency services rescued all the posties yet? I heard they were trapped in the canteen of the sorting office due to the water, with no electric as the generator sets were submerged!

that will have a big knock on effect to the rest of England as I think a lot of Government paperwork is processed through Sheffield, so anything sent by post may have been lost..

But heavy downpours are getting more frequent. Research at Newcastle University last year concluded that rainstorms have got twice as intense over much of Britain over the last four decades, as the climate has become warmer, and that the most severe happen four times more often. Some parts of the country, especially Scotland and the Northwest, it adds, are regularly deluged with a foot of rainfall within ten days, as if in the Indian monsoons.

The trend is expected to continue, and to lead to more floods. Scientists at Reading University predict that very wet winters will become five times as common over the course of the century, while the Environment Agency estimates that days of heavy rainfall will increase three or four fold, making flooding ten times more frequent.

Even now we are woefully vulnerable, thanks to decades of official complacency. More than two million homes, housing one in every twelve Britons, are already at risk of flooding; over 400,000 – home to 900,000 people – severely so.

Half of all the new housing built since the war, extending over an area the size of the West Midlands, has been imprudently built on land prone to flooding under today’s weather conditions. The Environment Agency has objected to hundreds of thousands of applications for housing in such areas over the last decade, only often to be ignored by local authorities or overridden by ministers – in flagrant contravention of official planning guidelines.

Concreting over the countryside turns woods, grassland and marshes – which absorb the rain – into impermeable-areas which cannot absorb it. So instead of gently percolating into the ground or forming wildliferich wetlands, the water sheets off the hard surfaces, and plunges into drains and culverts, swelling rivers and making them burst their banks more readily.

And the naturally bendy and meandering rivers have themselves been straightened out, often in a misguided attempt to “control” their flows. The result has been the opposite of what was intended; the water runs more quickly down the canalised channels, making it all the more able to break out of them.

Many vulnerable towns and villages still have not been provided with defences against flooding. And a report by the National Audit Office this month concluded that only 57 per cent of existing flood defence systems are in good condition. For the most important systems, such as those protecting towns, the figure was even lower – at just 46 per cent. All this is expected to get worse as rainfall becomes greater and more intense. The Association of British Insurers estimates that – unless ministers change their policies, and increase spending – the number of homes at risk of flooding will almost double to 3.5 million.