[News] from [guardian.co.uk]
[News > UK news > Weather]
Torrential rains and flooding rivers turn Cockermouth into an island
Martin Wainwright
guardian.co.uk, Friday 20 November 2009 19.35 GMT Article history
The twin rivers that bring thousands of tourists to Cockermouth turned on the town after the heaviest rainfall ever recorded in Britain, driving 250 people out of their homes.
Torrents flung cars across the picturesque centre, sweeping through Wordsworth's birthplace and ransacking one of the largest concentrations of small, independent shops in the north.
"See that oven," said Keith Fair, who opened an upmarket kitchen shop in Market Square two years ago. "That was in the window last night. Now it's on its side, halfway out of the back door."
"We were lucky – sort of," says his fitter Jim Woodford, a burly six-footer who had to cling to railings before flinging himself on the rescue boat. He points at the broken roof of a four-storey Georgian building. "The RAF's Sea King was up there this morning, winching out a group of people in their 70s and 80s."
Like many in Cockermouth, the pensioners had refused to believe that their cosy homes, painted in seaside pastel and newly strung with Christmas lights, might be death traps if water inundated the ground floors. The town has had three floods in the last 10 years and hosted an Environment Agency forum on six defence options only last month.
"But there's been nothing remotely like this," said Jeremy Petman, head brewer at Jennings, whose riverside malt store was awash with two waterlogged skips of spent hops. "This was a different scale. There'll be no brewing now for a long time."
Evacuee Lilian Lister agreed, adding in her wartime experiences in Cumbria's blitz for good measure. Now 91, she said that residents in her sheltered housing gradually realised that dry floors upstairs weren't enough. "We'd no power, no heat and no way of getting out for food," she said.
Like the rooftop group in Market Square, she and her neighbours were evacuated as Land Rovers from 42nd Brigade drove into the town to help four inshore lifeboats and a civilian army of volunteers. The jeeps added to the clatter of the Sea King and chainsaws deployed to deal with a small forest of uprooted trees; the most spectacular being stuck like a spear through the iron railings of Main Street bridge, rearing up almost vertically with its roots in the water and the trunk jammed against the 19th-century stone. Another was impaled in a circle of seats in Market Place and the town's Christmas tree, put up only last week, leaned against the statue of Richard, sixth Earl of Mayo.
"If the statue had gone, we'd really have felt that was it for Cockermouth," said June Priestley, drying out in the Bitter End, Cockermouth's other brewery, a micro attached to a pub on high ground. The landlady, Susan Askey, said: "We're safe here but that doesn't spare us from what's happened. I've spent the morning trying to track down what's happened to an elderly relative. Thank goodness I've just discovered where they've taken him, and he's safe."
Other families took hundreds of phone calls from anxious friends and family further away, with all roads cut at one stage except the narrow Whinlatter Pass from Keswick. The main A66 route was blocked by a new, third lake between Derwentwater and Bassenthwaite, whose temporary shores were lined with abandoned cars.
At the high school, on Cockermouth's highest ground, nurse Gill Aitchison was among scores of volunteers looking after other elderly victims, some of them groggy after a night on mattresses in the commandeered hall. A man sat in tears after returning briefly to collect clothes from his mud-plastered flat.
As the rivers slowly withdrew to their debris-littered courses, other volunteers started a huge clean-up with everything from mops to a farm slurry spreader. Hauled in by a tractor, the machine's heavy-duty pump sucked a swimming pool's worth of water from the cellars of Jan Mansergh's lingerie shop.
"My family are farmers," she said, "and as soon as they saw what was happening, they were on the phone offering help." The alley off Main Street filled with the stink of sewage.
"That's the river water," Mansergh said. "Don't ask what's in it, but everything in Cockermouth is going to need cleaning again and again."
[Environment > Climate change scepticism]
Climate change denial MEP attacks churchRoger Helmer says Anglican hierarchy has dropped the gospel in favour of 'the new religion of climate alarmism'
Allegra Stratton, political correspondent
guardian.co.uk, Friday 20 November 2009 15.11 GMT Article history
A Tory MEP has accused the Church of England of having "abandoned religious faith entirely and taken up the new religion of climate alarmism instead".
Roger Helmer, who resigned from the Tory frontbench in Europe when the Westminster leadership dumped its promised referendum on the Lisbon treaty, used a magazine article to urge the Church to "get back to the gospel".
Referring approvingly to the work of another writer who said bishops were spending more time "preaching climate change than the gospel of salvation", Helmer wrote: "The recent multi-faith conference at Windsor suggests that other world religions are taking the same line on climate change. This is particularly ironic at a time when the world is cooling and when more and more scientists around the world are breaking cover to challenge the theory of man-made global warming. Perhaps world religions should have more faith in God, and less in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change."
The Bishop of Leicester, Tim Stevens, said Helmer had not aired these views when he debated climate change in Leicester cathedral and asked whether "this was merely courtesy, or was it because the opportunity for a platform meant more to him than exposing his views to scrutiny or challenge from a live audience".
Helmer is one of a growing band of European politicians threatening to cause trouble for the Tory frontbench in the first few months of any government it may form. He and his eurosceptic colleagues insist they will not drop their campaign for a referendum on Lisbon.
Analysis by the leftwing website Next Left has shown that the top 10 Tory bloggers are climate change sceptics. This week Helmer convened a conference of climate change deniers at the European parliament. Speakers included Ross McKitrick, a Canadian professor who has said data indicating global warming has been fiddled; Tom Segalstad, a Norwegian geologist who says human-released CO2 would not have a large effect on the climate; Fred Goldberg, co-author of the polemic The Global Warming Scam; Hans Labohm, a Dutch professor who challenges the existence of global warming; and Professor Fred Singer, who wrote the documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle.
[News > UK news > Weather]
Torrential rains and flooding rivers turn Cockermouth into an island
Martin Wainwright
guardian.co.uk, Friday 20 November 2009 19.35 GMT Article history
The twin rivers that bring thousands of tourists to Cockermouth turned on the town after the heaviest rainfall ever recorded in Britain, driving 250 people out of their homes.
Torrents flung cars across the picturesque centre, sweeping through Wordsworth's birthplace and ransacking one of the largest concentrations of small, independent shops in the north.
"See that oven," said Keith Fair, who opened an upmarket kitchen shop in Market Square two years ago. "That was in the window last night. Now it's on its side, halfway out of the back door."
"We were lucky – sort of," says his fitter Jim Woodford, a burly six-footer who had to cling to railings before flinging himself on the rescue boat. He points at the broken roof of a four-storey Georgian building. "The RAF's Sea King was up there this morning, winching out a group of people in their 70s and 80s."
Like many in Cockermouth, the pensioners had refused to believe that their cosy homes, painted in seaside pastel and newly strung with Christmas lights, might be death traps if water inundated the ground floors. The town has had three floods in the last 10 years and hosted an Environment Agency forum on six defence options only last month.
"But there's been nothing remotely like this," said Jeremy Petman, head brewer at Jennings, whose riverside malt store was awash with two waterlogged skips of spent hops. "This was a different scale. There'll be no brewing now for a long time."
Evacuee Lilian Lister agreed, adding in her wartime experiences in Cumbria's blitz for good measure. Now 91, she said that residents in her sheltered housing gradually realised that dry floors upstairs weren't enough. "We'd no power, no heat and no way of getting out for food," she said.
Like the rooftop group in Market Square, she and her neighbours were evacuated as Land Rovers from 42nd Brigade drove into the town to help four inshore lifeboats and a civilian army of volunteers. The jeeps added to the clatter of the Sea King and chainsaws deployed to deal with a small forest of uprooted trees; the most spectacular being stuck like a spear through the iron railings of Main Street bridge, rearing up almost vertically with its roots in the water and the trunk jammed against the 19th-century stone. Another was impaled in a circle of seats in Market Place and the town's Christmas tree, put up only last week, leaned against the statue of Richard, sixth Earl of Mayo.
"If the statue had gone, we'd really have felt that was it for Cockermouth," said June Priestley, drying out in the Bitter End, Cockermouth's other brewery, a micro attached to a pub on high ground. The landlady, Susan Askey, said: "We're safe here but that doesn't spare us from what's happened. I've spent the morning trying to track down what's happened to an elderly relative. Thank goodness I've just discovered where they've taken him, and he's safe."
Other families took hundreds of phone calls from anxious friends and family further away, with all roads cut at one stage except the narrow Whinlatter Pass from Keswick. The main A66 route was blocked by a new, third lake between Derwentwater and Bassenthwaite, whose temporary shores were lined with abandoned cars.
At the high school, on Cockermouth's highest ground, nurse Gill Aitchison was among scores of volunteers looking after other elderly victims, some of them groggy after a night on mattresses in the commandeered hall. A man sat in tears after returning briefly to collect clothes from his mud-plastered flat.
As the rivers slowly withdrew to their debris-littered courses, other volunteers started a huge clean-up with everything from mops to a farm slurry spreader. Hauled in by a tractor, the machine's heavy-duty pump sucked a swimming pool's worth of water from the cellars of Jan Mansergh's lingerie shop.
"My family are farmers," she said, "and as soon as they saw what was happening, they were on the phone offering help." The alley off Main Street filled with the stink of sewage.
"That's the river water," Mansergh said. "Don't ask what's in it, but everything in Cockermouth is going to need cleaning again and again."
[Environment > Climate change scepticism]
Climate change denial MEP attacks churchRoger Helmer says Anglican hierarchy has dropped the gospel in favour of 'the new religion of climate alarmism'
Allegra Stratton, political correspondent
guardian.co.uk, Friday 20 November 2009 15.11 GMT Article history
A Tory MEP has accused the Church of England of having "abandoned religious faith entirely and taken up the new religion of climate alarmism instead".
Roger Helmer, who resigned from the Tory frontbench in Europe when the Westminster leadership dumped its promised referendum on the Lisbon treaty, used a magazine article to urge the Church to "get back to the gospel".
Referring approvingly to the work of another writer who said bishops were spending more time "preaching climate change than the gospel of salvation", Helmer wrote: "The recent multi-faith conference at Windsor suggests that other world religions are taking the same line on climate change. This is particularly ironic at a time when the world is cooling and when more and more scientists around the world are breaking cover to challenge the theory of man-made global warming. Perhaps world religions should have more faith in God, and less in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change."
The Bishop of Leicester, Tim Stevens, said Helmer had not aired these views when he debated climate change in Leicester cathedral and asked whether "this was merely courtesy, or was it because the opportunity for a platform meant more to him than exposing his views to scrutiny or challenge from a live audience".
Helmer is one of a growing band of European politicians threatening to cause trouble for the Tory frontbench in the first few months of any government it may form. He and his eurosceptic colleagues insist they will not drop their campaign for a referendum on Lisbon.
Analysis by the leftwing website Next Left has shown that the top 10 Tory bloggers are climate change sceptics. This week Helmer convened a conference of climate change deniers at the European parliament. Speakers included Ross McKitrick, a Canadian professor who has said data indicating global warming has been fiddled; Tom Segalstad, a Norwegian geologist who says human-released CO2 would not have a large effect on the climate; Fred Goldberg, co-author of the polemic The Global Warming Scam; Hans Labohm, a Dutch professor who challenges the existence of global warming; and Professor Fred Singer, who wrote the documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle.
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