IT’S been raining here now for 40 days and 40 nights. Not continuously, it is true. The downpour has stopped briefly now and then, and the sun has even peeped out tentatively for an hour or two, but only to torture us with false hope. Just when we think summer might at last have arrived, the dark clouds gather again and it starts to rain once more. And it’s been doing this now for weeks, with hours of rain every day.
The wet weather started in early June, and basically it has never stopped. The past month has been the wettest for 40 years. August is likely to set a new record for rainfall.
On Saturday, August 9, more rain fell in a few hours than in the entire month of August in any year over the past few decades. It’s a freaky accident of nature, we thought, as basements were pumped out and abandoned cars rescued. It cannot happen again. And then on the weekend just past it did happen again.
And again there are houses flooded in low lying areas all over the country, roads that are impassable, even whole sections of towns evacuated. Large areas in Carlow town, for example, were under water on Sunday night, and the top of the TV news carried dramatic film of people being brought to safety by boat.
On Saturday morning a Dublin to Cork train was derailed — I swear I’m not making this up — by a landslide caused by flooding. No one was hurt, but over 300 people had to clamber off the train and down the tracks to the nearest road where a fleet of buses came to the rescue.
Most of the rain is coming in off the Atlantic, in rain belt after rain belt with barely a few hours between each wet weather system. The result of this two and a half month long deluge is that by now the whole country is soaked.
Each new rain belt that passes over and dumps more rain causes renewed flooding. The ground is so wet it cannot absorb any more water.
But that’s Ireland, you say. Of course it’s wet. It always rains in Ireland. Sure isn’t it a grand soft day, and all that.
Well, yes, but there is a difference this year. Ireland is famous for gentle rain, for drizzle, for misty damp days. But there is nothing gentle about the rain we have had over the past two weekends.
The difference with this rain is the intensity. It’s what you might expect in Bangladesh in monsoon season, not in Ballina in what is supposed to be an Irish summer.
So what has gone wrong with our weather? People all over the country have started to ask the question because it has got to the stage now where it is clear to everyone that something strange is happening. It is happening on a scale that we have not seen before and it is getting worse rather than better.
This summer, for example, for the second year in a row, the National Livestock Show in Tullamore had to be cancelled. This is one of the biggest agricultural shows in the country, and it takes something very serious to stop it. It is unprecedented that it should be cancelled two years in a row because of weather.
The reason Ireland’s grand soft day weather is turning into something more sinister is, of course, global climate change. People here no longer regard this idea as fanciful.
Now it’s not just the hippy environmental activists here who are discussing global warming and its effects. Over the past two weeks everyone in Ireland is talking about it as a reality — farmers with flooded land, town people whose homes have been flooded, business people who can’t transport goods around, insurance company executives counting the cost.
Up to a few years ago, most people here seemed to put a question mark over the whole global warming theory. Either that or they cracked jokes about it.
Wouldn’t it be great to have hot summers like the south of France? We could all start our own vineyards. We would save a fortune on both foreign holidays and our booze bill. Roll on global warming!
The problem is, it’s not working out like that. Yes our climate seems to be warming in general. A report a year ago from Ireland’s Environmental Protection Agency showed that Ireland is warming up at twice the rate of the rest of the world on average.
The report, which analyzed meteorological records going back more than 100 years concluded that Ireland warmed up by 0.42 degrees per decade between 1980 and 2004, which is about twice the rate of increase globally.
But it’s not just getting warmer in Ireland, it’s also getting wetter. Yes, we seem to be getting nice mild winters and nice warm summers ... but the summers are wetter as well as warmer. And sometimes this is leading to bursts of rain of almost tropical intensity, as happened over the past two weekends here.
I have read several theories about what is happening. The most plausible is that global warming is causing an increase in water temperature in the Atlantic which makes it easier for water to evaporate off the surface and form clouds which drift across the ocean and then fall as rain as soon as they hit landfall. Our problem is that Ireland is the first landfall, and the prevailing winds carry all this moisture over to us where it gets dumped.
Our position on the edge of Europe beside the warming Atlantic would also offer a possible explanation of why it’s warming up here faster than the global average.
The Environmental Protection Agency’s report over a year ago suggested that the main effects of this climate change on us would be more intense rainfall in the north and west, with summer drought in the south and east. It also predicted milder winters, with less frost.
All of which seems to be happening, except that the increase in rainfall seems to be right across the country. There is no drought in the east. Instead we’re all getting soaked. Maybe the country is not wide enough for the rainfall division predicted by the agency.
Whatever the explanation, there is no denying the intensity and frequency of extreme rainfall we have experienced in Ireland last year and again this year. The milder climate in general may open new opportunities for our farmers by lengthening the growing season, but first of all they have to learn to cope with the regular deluges that now seem to be part of our summers.
Learning to cope is something we are all going to have to do. Some of the experts interviewed in the media here over the weekend all made that point (and it was interesting also that they all presumed an acceptance that global warming is a reality and is here to stay). They all warned that we would have to increase our design standards for the capacity of storm drains and water courses to prevent flooding.
One of the spectacular (even funny) examples of our failure to do this so far was a huge underpass which was built just last year in Belfast to ease traffic, and which flooded to a depth of 20 feet when the downpour happened last weekend. Whatever storm drains were built into the underpass clearly were unable to cope with the volume of water that flowed into the underpass from adjoining streets.
One expert warned on RTE that even infrastructure like roads, bridges, buildings with basements and so on built in the last five years may not be designed to cope with the new conditions.
On a more simple level, there has been a lot of house building on traditional flood plains on the north side of Dublin city in the past few years, and there is a big question mark over how much allowance was made for what will happen if rainfall increases permanently. How many of these new housing estates will end up with flooded ground floors?
In the rush to provide housing for our fast growing population in the Celtic Tiger years, concerns like this were brushed aside by politicians and developers alike. But it is the unfortunate homeowners who will suffer in the long run.
The same can be said about our efforts to provide flood relief measures in areas near rivers and lakes (like the Shannon) that have been prone to flooding in the past. We have never been good at it, and there is no reason to think that we will be much better at it in the immediate future as the problem gets worse.
As the old saying goes, this would be a great little country — if only they could put a roof over it.
|