Flood alert: pay up or keep your fingers crossed

Flood alert: pay up or keep your fingers crossed

There was something awe-inspiring about the scale of the disaster enveloping Central England yesterday. From Pangbourne on the Thames to Tewkesbury under the Severn, and a score of places besides, locals seemed overwhelmed by the deluge of television reporters that had descended upon them. The luckiest journalists stood on bridges with roaring rivers as a backdrop, the less fortunate organised themselves a shallow lake or a watery road, the effect often subverted by the kids on bicycles riding over the supposedly impassable floodwaters. In Gloucester, by a large puddle, the BBC news was securely anchored by Kate Silverton, wearing a distressed expression and an even more distressed maroon waterproof. George Alagiah circled overhead in a helicopter, rescuing no one.

The perils of this inundation were obvious. The BBC website carried one item inviting the flooded to send their pictures “and moving footage” to a web address, and another informing readers that motorists who had stopped to photograph the floods had been slammed by the police for “endangering themselves and other road users”. From Standlake in Oxfordshire (“where the Windrush meets the Thames”) a reporter periodically stopped volunteers filling sandbags so that she could interview them. Then there was the danger of runoff from the concerned furrows of Silverton’s brow.

There is a rubric for moments like this, and it’s usually a slightly silly one. “Chaos” refers to irritating disruption, not a state of anarchy; “tales of human misery” don’t signify imminent death, but pensioners being taken upstairs and given hot meals by volunteers; “a wall of water . . . expected to roar down the Thames through the heart of England” is an abrupt rise in river levels, not an inland tsunami.

But for once we have a really quite substantial natural calamity, more akin to the Great Hurricane of 1987 than to the Not So Great Floods of 2000. Rivers that local people have never heard of are bursting their banks from the Welsh border to the Home Counties, covering substantial areas in a reddy-brown soup of water, soil and God knows what.

My favourite question from yesterday came from the front of this paper, asking: “The floods: what went wrong?” The answer, it seemed to me, was: “It rained a hell of a lot.” But the query suggested another headline, this time from a Sunday newspaper, announcing that the Government had been warned of potential flooding as early as last Wednesday. So why, it was implied, hadn’t they stopped it? An irresistible image came to mind of members of the Government, led by Gordon Brown, lying down on river banks to block the rising tide.

I have seen it suggested that ditches weren’t properly cleared, that pumps were unavailable and that perhaps this would have been resolved had we only appointed a minister of floods to coordinate everything (or, failing that, to build an Ark).

All this is just possibly true. Perhaps some of the places now under water would have been an inch or two drier had things been handled better, though it could be that our demands for complete security from natural disaster are overoptimistic. Maybe there are countries where no one ever gets flooded, and there are no forest fires, avalanches, hurricanes, landslides or tornadoes, or if there are, no one is ever inconvenienced by them. I doubt it. I was struck by the mobile flood barriers for Upton-upon-Severn in Worcestershire getting stuck in gridlock on the motorways – and which would have been insufficient for the scale of the floods in that town even had they arrived.

So much for the short term. What about medium-term prevention? Couldn’t we spend enough on flood defences to ensure that almost any building in the flood plain is safe? Or couldn’t we stop building houses in the flood plain, in case we cannot construct good enough defences? The answer to these questions lie in risk assessment. We don’t get flooded every year. Last year, in fact, we had a drought. So how much ought we to pay to safeguard ourselves against an occasional inundation? This week’s publication of the housing Green Paper turned flood-plain building into the temporary “dominant narrative” of housing policy. Everywhere it was as though the commentariat were quoting that fabulous precautionary couplet from William McGonagall to the effect that: “The stronger we our houses build/ The less chance we have of being killed.”

You’d think we were talking about the Nile with its reliable flooding. But our places are built in valleys and by rivers. The nervous Spaniard may have built up hill, we, however, built down dale. Somewhere such as Tewkesbury, surrounded by clue-bearing water meadows, was created on the flood plain, and every 60 years or so, it floods. So should we spend billions on flood defences and stop flood-plain building – incurring an inevitable extra demand on green-belt land – because of this infrequent risk? Mr Brown, I think, says no.

The Dutch, apparently, only permit developments where the risk is of one serious flood every 10,000 years, whereas our Government is prepared to build where the risk is one flood every century. If we think that’s wrong, are we the British people willing to run the expense and non-financial costs of Dutch levels of prudence? Might you not end up, as the British rail system has done, extraordinarily safe at huge expense?

One should note here that the prices of floods themselves have risen. Those of 1947 set the country back £300 million at today’s prices. Yesterday the Association of British Insurers estimated this year’s floods as costing a rather round £2 billion. It could be that we simply can’t afford not to spend the necessary money on flood protection. Even so, I can’t help recalling that, back in the mid1990s, the people of Shrewsbury opposed flood defences that were recommended by the Environment Agency, because they would have been too physically intrusive. They would rather, they said, live with the risk.

That, at least, was a grown-up discussion, in which citizens weighed up the chances of a catastrophe against the price of guarding against it. It suggested the improbable day when we might see a sodden householder tell a TV reporter that yes, she had lost half her furniture, but, on balance, it was worth it.

2^nd August 2007 - In a Tea Cup

This article appeared in the Times last Saturday and I thought it was so brilliant I wanted to share it with you.

On second reading, my curiosity woke up even more and I found myself looking at weather charts from the 13^th Century to see if anything was similar to our present experiences, and, of course, to further this experiment in astrological weather forecasting.

See what you think …

From The Times

July 28, 2007
750 years ago the weather was just as calamitous

Alexander Murray

Readers of The Times may turn to Matthew Parris to follow the tide of contemporary events, but a monk with almost the same name served a similar purpose in the 13th century. After a month of relentless rain and widespread flooding, the latter’s observations make illuminating reading.

Matthew Paris’s massive History of the English was written, in Latin, mostly just before and after 1250. The author was a Benedictine monk of St Alban’s and his details on nonpolitical subjects are usually credible. His weather reports for the 1230s and 1240s show that the present floods had precedents.

Global warming makes an appearance. The summers of 1236 and 1241 were “almost unbearably” hot, and so dry that cattle died of thirst. But wind and rain are more prominent. The year 1237 had two hurricanes strong enough to knock down buildings, and another in early 1238 sank 20 ships at Portsmouth.

That wind was followed by two or three months of incessant rain, after which came the same period of heat and drought, and then rain again all autumn, ruining crops.

There were several floods, the worst in 1236-37 and 1248-49. In 1236, Paris writes: Between January and mid-March the rain never stopped. No one could remember anything like it. Serious floods began in the second week of February, when high tides meant that rivers could not empty into the sea. Fords became useless, river banks disappeared, fields, bridges, mills, all vanished.

Disaster struck again later in the same year, this time in East Anglia: In the middle of November a combination of onshore wind and high tide continued for an unheard-of two-and-a-half days, so that the rivers could not empty. Coasts were laid waste, ships torn from their anchorage and lost, houses wrecked, trees torn up. Many people were drowned, not to mention entire herds and flocks of livestock . . . One tiny village had to bury a hundred bodies in a single day.

The Thames valley suffered seriously twice in these years. In 1236: On 19 November there was a deafening thunderstorm with terrifying flashes of lightning. People feared that worse was to come, and were right. Rain and wind continued incessantly for many days afterwards, and the Thames overflowed its banks, so that round Lambeth it grew to a width of six miles.

Floods came again 13 years later: There was heavy rain from early June, followed by serious flooding, especially severe in the country round Abingdon.

—The author is Emeritus Fellow of University College, Oxford, and a former tutor in medieval history

1236:  Saturn in Gemini. Gemini is a mutable Air sign, which is dry = drought, and the mutable component of Gemini signifies changeable, blustery weather

1241: Saturn is in Leo: Leo is a fire sign = a time of dramatic weather and dramatic heat – 1916, 1946, 1976, 2006 … Saturn was in Leo during all of these very hot years

1237: Saturn in Cancer from September, Cancer is a water sign – a time of cold and wet weather – Boscastle, Katrina and the Tsunami … Saturn was in Cancer when all of these events occurred

1238: Saturn retrogrades (an apparent backward motion) into Gemini until June = a time of strong changeable winds leading to further cold and wet weather when Saturn moves on to Cancer once more

1248 and 1249: Saturn in Scorpio: a water sign = intensely cold and wet

There is a specific mention here of 19^th November 1236 in Lambeth. As an experiment, it might be worth looking at the weather chart for Lambeth that day, just to see what it shows …

Thunder usually occurs when hot fronts bump into cold fronts …

Aries on the 4^th indicates a hot day

Saturn in Gemini indicates a day of string winds and the air is dry

Saturn is applying to Neptune; a cold and wet day

Mars, ruler of the 4^th, is in Leo – a dramatically hot day

The Moon is waning in Leo – a day of dramatic hot weather and moisture in the air – ‘close’

Mercury is in Scorpio – lots of water in the air

Mercury is Square Mars, ruler of the 4^th and traditional ruler of Scorpio = a day of tempestuous  ‘angry’  winds

Jupiter in Sag’ signifies warmth and high clouds, but … it is in exact Opposition to Saturn, which is a bit like putting a wet blanket onto a nice day

Venus: cold and wet, is in Capricorn: cold = cold wet day

Conclusion:  there are enough powerful differences in the mix to create a cauldron of forces that needed to boil over.

Over the next few days, the Moon would pass through Leo and make contact with Mars, ruler of the 4^th, on the following day and leaving dramatic Leo for cold Virgo on the 22^nd.

A second event mentioned in the article is the flooding of Abingdon in June 1249:

Leo – dramatic weather, is on the 4^th

It is The 15^th of June and Leo’s ruler has just ingressed to zero degrees of Cancer – it is the summer Solstice (impressed if you know how come it’s not the 21^st of June in 1249)

Saturn is in Scorpio, signifying a time of intense problems with water, and is Conjunct Pluto, the planet associated with Scorpio in modern astrology.

Mercury is in Cancer, a water sign, signifying moisture or water in the air

Mars is in Aries, the sign that it rules, signifying a time of  ‘aggressive’  or blistering heat

Mercury is Square Mars, signifying day of tempestuous  ‘angry’  winds

Neptune is Conjunct the Ascendant, signifying even more water problems

Jupiter, light high clouds, is in Capricorn, which is akin to dropping your hope into a well of deep gloom. It also happens to be in exact Opposition to Neptune, the archetypal God of the seas and all things water

Saturn, planet of extreme cold, is Square the IC, which would signify a lower temperature and a time of hard weather

Conclusions:

I’d love to hear your conclusions …

To me, it seems there are some uncanny synchronous coincidences with the themes that pop up here with those of our own times.

In one sense it shouldn’t surprise us because, after all, we already know the planets of our solar system repeatedly revolve and form complex patterns that are constantly making, breaking and re-forming again. What might be surprising is the frequency with which the symbolism of the positions held by the planets at the times of these weather events matches these events so consistently …  and, if that were not enough, how often the same symbolism is present at the times of extreme weather conditions. Food for thought isn’t it … ?

Love

Dave

Hello

Or, at least, the last day for the next 29 years

You may remember, from all the previous emails that Astrometeorology states that Planets, and Signs of the Zodiac signify Hot, Cold, Wet and Dry:

Heat is not necessarily dry and may be wet – but certainly not cold.

Cold is not necessarily wet and may be dry – but certainly not hot.

Now, of course, generalisations do tend to be somewhat broad, and to take a long term overview of the weather is far from the accuracy afforded by looking at a specific day (and even this degree of accuracy may be befuddled by the subjective wishes and innate optimism of the astrologer doing the interpretation …  )

So, just in a general sense, I sent an email in the summer of 2005 telling people that 2006 would be on a par with 1976 and that the media would shout about global warming from the spring onwards … which is exactly what has happened.

During this time, however, the specific details of our daily weather have clouded our enjoyment of our once-in-30 years moment of dramatic heat …

Through August 2006, Mars, the planet signifying extreme heat, transited through Virgo, and the temperature cooled.

Ramsey, the medieval astrologer from whom much of this olde lore comes, states that Virgo signifies:  Virgo - cold, dry, on the cool side with winds; blustery

and indeed, it was …

And for the last 18 months or so, like a hazy cloud spoiling a hill top view, Neptune has been Opposing Saturn:

(Neptune - cool, wet, fog, mist, erosion in an earth sign, peculiar, freakish weather events, flooding Neptune’s power lies in its ability to lower the barometer and provoke torrential downpours and flooding conditions. During colder seasons, warming trends and thaws are Neptune’s delight. Dry and warm stormy – from Kim Farnell)

Yesterday, the BBC carried a news item in which they said that this summer has been the wettest since records began in 1914 and yet temperatures were still above the seasonal norm

So …

What now ?

... it’s not too hot I’m afraid

In fact, it really won’t be too hot again for a little while

In a broad, and general sense, the thermostat is turning down for a little while

Tomorrow, Saturn begins a 3-year passage through Virgo, signifying a period of weather that is cooler than usual

And with accompanying Venus Opposing Neptune and Moon in Taurus, it’s not a great start

and …

there is more

The orbit of Mars around the Sun is twice that of the Earth.

Or, to state it subjectively, The Sun takes a month to transit a sign of the Zodiac and Mars takes two months … usually.

However, due to a phenomena known as ‘Retrograde Motion’, the passage of planets through Sings of the Zodiac is sometimes stilted and longer than normal.

Just such an instance occurs with Mars after it ends its current residence in Gemini.

Mars - acute, heat, extreme if combined with other violent planets. Warm and dry influence. Hot summers, droughts, and mild winters are but a few of its traits.
Filtered through …
Gemini - tends to cold, dry, fair, clouds moving, open sky, fluctuations in temp. – yep, that seems like today


Cancer - cooling off to cold, wet, chance of rain with downpours, short-term wet – guess what’s on its way …

The forthcoming transit of Mars through Cancer is longer than the usual two months. In fact, it’s longer than three months, four months and even five months.

Mars ingresses to Cancer on the 29^th of September 2007 and finally leaves Cancer for Leo on the 9^th of May 2008

That’s a whole 7 months of the planet of extreme heat in water while the planet of extreme cold is in cold.

Or, to put it a little more clearly …

That’s a whole 7 months of the planet of extreme heat (Mars)  in water  (Cancer) while the planet of extreme cold (Saturn) is in a cold period (Virgo).

and with a little interpretation …

Mars in Cancer = Lots of warm water in the air: humidity, fine rain and fog.

Saturn in Virgo = Overall temperature colder than seasonal norm.

So, we have a potential for there to be a period of cold, wet weather from the end of September 2007 to the second week of May 2008 … with fluctuations, of course, and Saturn remains in Virgo until the 21^st of July 2010

Well, since everyone expects the global warming stuff to continue making everything really hot and for temperatures to continue being above their seasonal norm – and why shouldn’t they be, we’ll now have a really good chance to see if this astro weather forecasting malarkey really does work.

When it was seriously wet, the astrology said it would be surprisingly warm for a couple of years – and it was.

Now, the astrology indicates a cooler and wet autumn followed by two colder than usual years  - and we shall see

If it does go the way the astrology indicates, against the grain of our expectations, then we may have to conclude, ‘there is something in it’, will we not ?

Many thanks

Love

Dave

Hello

Weather Forecasting with Astrology suggested us this would be the case when I first looked at it in 2003/4

You may remember (and, if you haven’t seen any of the previous Astro-Weather Forecasting emails and would like to, please ask) …

2005 – I sent an email saying that Saturn’s initial passage into Leo at the end of 2005 would sit on top of the old cold and wet Cancerian weather, and it would not heat up dramatically until the spring of 2006 – which it did

You may also remember the emails regarding flood patterns and the cycle of heat/flood … heat/flood … heat/flood … that seems to recur every 30/60 years

and, you may remember that Saturn went into Virgo in the autumn of 2007, sitting upon a year of different weather, much like Saturn’s initial sojourn into Leo at the end of 2005

This would indicate then, that it would nt be until the mid-winter of 2008 that we are afforded the opportunity to experience Saturn in Virgo properly. In other words, the Astrometeorology suggests that it is from now that we will begin to experience temperature lower than usual.

The idea of a lowering of temperature in 2008 and 2009 flies in the face of all expectation, so this really will let us know whether or not the transits of Saturn have a significant bearing on the overall temperature or on the magnitude of  cold  that we experience

Time to find out …

BBC article appears below

Many thanks and a safe, happy and comfortably warm year

Love

2007 'second warmest year' in UK
A summer of rain but still much warmer than average Last year was the second warmest on record in the UK, according to figures released by the Met Office. The average mean temperature across the UK was 9.6C - slightly cooler than in 2006, but continuing the recent trend towards warmer temperatures. Since UK-wide records began in 1914, nine of the 10 warmest years have happened since 1989. 2007 was no exception despite a natural weather event known as La Nina, which usually reduces global temperatures. It was one degree above what you would normally expect for the 30-year period from 1971 to 2000. Extreme weather Many people will look back on 2007 as a year of weather extremes. Enormous amounts of rain in May, June and July caused devastating floods but in other months it was drier than usual. There is much greater certainty that this is because of manmade pollution Dr Matt Huddleston The year was also characterised by relatively warm conditions at night, bringing fewer frosts - 18 days fewer than normal for the UK overall, and warmer sea temperatures. "To the public it seemed like a very dull and cool year because we didn't get a heatwave," said Met office climate scientist Dr Matt Huddleston. "But the warm night temperatures and the lack of frosts mean on average it was a very warm year." Global trend The UK's top 10 warmest years on record (in order) are 2006, 2007, 2003, 2004, 2002, 2005, 1990, 1997, 1949 and 1999. Globally, there is a similar trend - the top 10 being 1998, 2005, 2003, 2002, 2004, 2006, 2007, 2001, 1997 and 1995. "Nine of the 10 warmest years have happened since 1989," said Dr Huddleston. "There is an inexorable rise in temperature that is small compared to daily weather changes," he added. "There is much greater certainty that this is because of manmade pollution." The Met Office originally predicted that 2007 could be the warmest on record globally. The year began with a weak El Nino, a Pacific Ocean phenomenon that normally raises temperatures. But since the end of April 2007, its cooler relation, the La Nina, has prevailed, taking some of the heat out of what could have been an even warmer year. 2008 is expected to be another warm year with global temperatures forecast to be 0.37C above the long-term average.

11^th August 2007 - there’s nothing like a country walk on a sunny day …

and, this was nothing like …

Well, with The Moon in Scorpio in the 4^th it was bound to be a tad wet. True to form, the predicted rains and sweeping winds made for a dramatic day exploring Barrows, Mounds and Stones.

Like last year, the very friendly people who came had a wonderful robust spirit and everyone was determined to see the Ley Line day through to it’s final destination at Old Sarum. That’s not to say that the bright warm and sunny Ley Line days are any less spirited, but here’s a telling contrast …

This was taken a year ago today:  11^th August 2007, the last month of Saturn’s journey through Leo:

And, the first summer of Saturn in Virgo …

And, just in case you didn’t catch it, here’s the weather prediction (for further information on weather forecasting with astrology, please feel free to ask_ …

5^th August 2008 - Weather to wear a hat

Hello

While the Trine between Jupiter and Saturn bodes well, and Mercury signifies a warmer wind in Leo, the most significant element is the 4^th House Moon in Scorpio, signifying a lot of water …

That the Moon is also Square the Sun and Mercury compounds this, even though it is lifted by its Sextile to Saturn

I’d expect the day to be overcast with a high chance of rain, so please bring wet weather clothing and be prepared for a hot lunch at The Barge in Honeystreet if it’s too rough to go up onto Alton Barnes White Horse

Last year was a thoroughly wet and windy day and was one of the best Ley Line days we’ve had. The  ‘get to the end of the tour’  spirit was really tangible and made for a dramatic landscape

See you at 10.00 on Saturday

Dave