Flood disaster (From Malvern Gazette)

If Mr English speaks as an engineer, I doubt it. His letter is laden with inaccuracies.
The pumps are not to counter leaking gates, they take surface water from within the town that is unable to drain normally because of flooding and pump it back into the river.
If PR designed the defences they did a good job.
Flooding in the last session spiralled towards 2007 levels because of saturated ground, with snow and rain dumped on top. Spill over levels were bound to be higher. Without defences Hanley Road and the waterfront would have been closed and properties further blighted. Blight leads to a reduced visitor experience and would eventually lead to a blight umbrella.

Flood defences work and have saved a lot of people from the sort of trauma we saw in '07

Upton flood defences are an excellent front line defence for many years Upton has been hampered with floodwaters. We visit the area on an occasional basis and can only complement those who instigated this engineering works.
Yes if you restrict water in one particular area then you will no doubt move a very similar problem to another area further down the flood plain.
When developers build properties on virgin land they deprive that are of valuable ground soakage of any waters that are sent from the heavens above. Whether it is in the form of rain, hail, or snow. Recently, snow covered most of the UK, this was on top of saturated land with little soakage.
If itinerants moved on to open land all stops a pulled out to remove them. In many areas’ Mounds of rumble have been placed around a vulnerable piece of open land to prevent illegal usage. Yet when it comes to protecting people’s property from storm and tempest, we only do it piecemeal. Currently the state pays out millions in unemployment benefits. Why can these persons under supervision be employed to build mounds of earth along strategic areas of riverbanks in an attempt to save some areas that are prevalent to flooding.
We can always find monies to aid others who have suffered some disaster or another.
Finance is always available for wars that really are not our problem. However, when it comes to our own survival. We do nothing but moan about the unemployed, and people who are on benefit. I did a spell in the forces when I was in full time employment. They called it National Service. Surely, we could have a similar idea using the unemployed to carry out flood defence work.