yesterday a grey day. well except for the evening (by which time horsemouth was watching the news and settling down to dinner). later the watch lifted from terry pratchett (horsemouth regrets being so humourless that he didn't appreciate these at the time).
in the confluence stick in the wheel have posted up a lammas mix and it includes alula down.
NASA has published a sea-level rise/ regular flooding map and, tragedy of tragedies, it appears to wipe out the east end (of the seaside towns). of course the olympic park as a whole won't flood (much of it is up hills) but the river valley of the lea is looking like a good flooding candidate (as is most of the flat meandering meadows and floodplains since built upon to create tower hamlets. think about horsemouth's walk of a few days ago.
as a friend notes the LDDC and newham council appear to have just agreed a massive new housing development that will build on a significant amount of the olympic park green space. of course horsemouth wants housing at social rent built regardless of everything else (even if it is through a poor door out back by the bins and on a floodplain but that's just him).
docklands seems to go also (oh dear, how sad, never mind). tate, tate modern, chelsea etc.
to horsemouth there appear to be a number of complicating factors. it's mostly about catchment area - not in the sense of where the school pupils come from but where the water is collected from that can then roll downhill over the concrete and asphalt (or bubble up through the drains) and into your basement flat. it's a networked flow rate problem (er. and thus a bit difficult to solve). several of horsemouth's neighbours got flooded in the recent spate of storms and as horsemouth lives in a basement room this gives him pause for thought.
as the sea level rises the column of water it will support in the drainage system gets higher thus the flow rate of water the antiquated victorian drainage system can remove from the city's streets (and housing stock) is reduced.
one solution is to enable the city streets to absorb more water by, for example, planting more trees, digging up more asphalt and concrete and regreening it into soil and plant cover so that the rain is absorbed where it falls and does not need to be drained off anywhere (e.g. further downhill into people's basement flats). more tree cover is going to be an excellent idea as the city heats up in summer (you see horsemouth quite likes the eco-apocalypse).
of course this can happen architects blueprint ways or detroit-style urban collapse ways.
in the light of this, and despite the building safety scandals, the communal endeavour's investment in tower block housing is beginning to look fairly smart. horsemouth has been thinking about this a fair bit (this and moving the communal endeavour towards net zero).
today. a wander around with howard (maybe). the weather outside isn't looking so good.
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