Topic: WE'RE STUFFED!!!

[erik]

MI6 probes UK link to nuclear trade with Iran

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,2099634,00.html

Mark Townsend, crime correspondent
Sunday June 10, 2007
The Observer

A British company has been closed down after being caught in an apparent attempt to sell black-market weapons-grade uranium to Iran and Sudan, The Observer can reveal.

Anti-terrorist officers and MI6 are now investigating a wider British-based plot allegedly to supply Iran with material for use in a nuclear weapons programme. One person has already been charged with attempting to proliferate 'weapons of mass destruction'.

During the 20-month investigation, which also involved MI5 and Customs and Excise, a group of Britons was tracked as they obtained weapons-grade uranium from the black market in Russia. Investigators believe it was intended for export to Sudan and on to Iran.

 A number of Britons, who are understood to have links with Islamic terrorists abroad, remain under surveillance. Investigators believe they have uncovered the first proof that al-Qaeda supporters have been actively engaged in developing an atomic capability. The British company, whose identity is known to The Observer but cannot be disclosed for legal reasons, has been wound up.

A Customs and Excise spokesman said: 'We continue to investigate allegations related to the supply of components for nuclear programmes including related activities of British nationals.'

It is not clear whether all of those involved in the alleged nuclear conspiracy were aware of the uranium's ultimate destination or of any intended use.

British agents believe Russian black-market uranium was destined for Sudan, described as a 'trans-shipment' point. The alleged plot, however, was disrupted in early 2006, before the nuclear material reached its final destination.

Roger Berry, chairman of Parliament's Quadripartite Committee, which monitors arms exports, said: 'With the collapse of the Soviet Union there was always the question over not just uranium but where other WMD components were going and how this could be controlled. Real credit must go to the enforcement authorities that they have disrupted this. The really worrying aspect is that if one company is involved, are there others out there?'

Politically, the allegations hold potentially huge ramifications for diplomatic relations between the West and Tehran. Already, tensions are running high between Iran, the US and the European Union over the true extent of Iran's nuclear ambitions. Iran refuses to suspend its nuclear programme in the face of mounting pressure, arguing its intent is entirely peaceful and solely aimed at producing power for civilian use.

Investigators are understood to have evidence that Iran was to receive the uranium to help develop a nuclear weapons capability. 'They may argue that the material is for civilian use but it does seem an extremely odd way to procure uranium,' said Berry.

Alleged evidence of Sudan's role will concern British security services. The East African state has long been suspected of offering a haven for Islamist terrorists and has been accused of harbouring figures including Osama bin Laden who, during the mid-Nineties, set up a number of al-Qaeda training camps in the country.

Details of the plot arrive against a backdrop of increasing co-operation between Sudan and Iran on defence issues, although the level of involvement, if any, of the governments in Khartoum and Tehran in the alleged nuclear plot is unclear.

However, circumstantial evidence suggesting that elements within both countries might be colluding on military matters has been mounting in recent months. A Sudanese delegation visited Iran's uranium conversion facility in February, while the East African country reportedly recently signed a mutual defence co-operation pact with Iran, allowing Tehran to deploy ballistic missiles in Sudan.

[erik]

Deadly storms hit Australian city 'like a quake'

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20070610/wl_afp/australiaweather;_ylt=As.qrOK_B608huQZE9S6rGwfYhAF

Sun Jun 10, 9:45 AM ET

SYDNEY (AFP) - Rescue workers are urging thousands of people to evacuate their homes after deadly storms lashed Australia's east coast, leaving parts of one city looking like an earthquake had struck, officials said Sunday.

After days of torrential rains, flood waters surged into areas north of Sydney, isolating towns, swamping farms, homes and businesses and causing millions of dollars in damage.

The death toll rose to nine when police found the body of a man who died after he was swept into a storm water drain on a flooded road.

Authorities earlier found the body of a man who died when his car was swept off a highway into a swollen creek.

His wife and three young children, aged two, three and nine, who were travelling with him, also died when the road collapsed underneath them, but their bodies had been found earlier.

Although bringing much-needed rain to Sydney and towns to its north, the storms have wreaked havoc since slamming into the city and the Central Coast and Newcastle to the north on Friday.

Among the dead are a 29-year-old man crushed when a tree fell on his car near Newcastle and a couple who perished when their vehicle was swept off a bridge while crossing a flooded river in the Hunter Valley.

Officials said Newcastle looked as if it had been hit by an earthquake.

"What I saw were parts of Newcastle that resembled the kind of damage that followed the (1989) earthquake," New South Wales state premier Morris Iemma said after visiting the city.

"Construction sites and scaffolding, debris on roads, abandoned cars, homes that were damaged, trees having fallen on homes, extensive damage. It was quite disbelieving," he added.

The 1989 earthquake packed a magnitude of 5.6 and killed 13 people.

Newcastle resident Harry Gregory told The Sunday Telegraph he fled his home after his bed and fridge started to float in the flood waters.

"Everything's ruined," he said. "I have a lounge (sofa) stuck in my front fence and I have got no idea who it belongs to."

Emergency workers evacuated 400 people from their homes along the Central Coast overnight, including by boat and helicopter, and were Sunday urging some 5,000 residents in Maitland, to the north, to seek shelter away from rising flood waters.

State Emergency Services spokesman Steve Delaney said the Hunter River could peak at 11 metres (36 feet) higher than normal later in the day.

"This will meet their predictions. It won't go below. It will meet their predictions by midnight tonight," he told ABC radio.

"So there is a real, clear possibility that the levy might overtop this evening."

Meanwhile, the clean-up began in Newcastle and flood waters were receding in Singleton.

Accompanied by gale force winds, the storms have driven a massive freighter aground in Newcastle, forced the suspension of ferry services in Sydney Harbour and blacked out tens of thousands of homes.

Prime Minister John Howard said those affected by storms and flooding would be entitled to cash payments in addition to natural disaster funding offered by the state government.

"I know I speak for every Australian in saying that the country is thinking of you and we're heartbroken by the loss of lives and the tragic circumstances in which a number of people have lost their lives," he said.

"It is an immense disaster."

Maritime officials said salvage crews were hopeful that the 30,000-tonne vessel Pasha Bulker, still stranded on a Newcastle beach after running aground amid huge seas on Friday, could be refloated as violent conditions eased.

"There's every hope that a plan to safely remove the ship from the beach will be progressed pretty quickly," spokesman Neil Patchett said.

Are you OK, antipodes?
They write here that a new storm is coming and around 1,000 people are being evacuated. Is it so?

[erik]

The wrath of 2007: America's great drought

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article2643033.ece

By Andrew Gumbel in Los Angeles
Published: 11 June 2007

America is facing its worst summer drought since the Dust Bowl years of the Great Depression. Or perhaps worse still.

From the mountains and desert of the West, now into an eighth consecutive dry year, to the wheat farms of Alabama, where crops are failing because of rainfall levels 12 inches lower than usual, to the vast soupy expanse of Lake Okeechobee in southern Florida, which has become so dry it actually caught fire a couple of weeks ago, a continent is crying out for water.

In the south-east, usually a lush, humid region, it is the driest few months since records began in 1895. California and Nevada, where burgeoning population centres co-exist with an often harsh, barren landscape, have seen less rain over the past year than at any time since 1924. The Sierra Nevada range, which straddles the two states, received only 27 per cent of its usual snowfall in winter, with immediate knock-on effects on water supplies for the populations of Las Vegas and Los Angeles.

The human impact, for the moment, has been limited, certainly nothing compared to the great westward migration of Okies in the 1930 - the desperate march described by John Steinbeck in The Grapes of Wrath.

Big farmers are now well protected by government subsidies and emergency funds, and small farmers, some of whom are indeed struggling, have been slowly moving off the land for decades anyway. The most common inconvenience, for the moment, are restrictions on hosepipes and garden sprinklers in eastern cities.

But the long-term implications are escaping nobody. Climatologists see a growing volatility in the south-east's weather - today's drought coming close on the heels of devastating hurricanes two to three years ago. In the West, meanwhile, a growing body of scientific evidence suggests a movement towards a state of perpetual drought by the middle of this century. "The 1930s drought lasted less than a decade. This is something that could remain for 100 years," said Richard Seager a climatologist at Columbia University and lead researcher of a report published recently by the government's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

While some of this year's dry weather is cyclical - California actually had an unusually wet year last year, so many of the state's farmers still have plenty of water for their crops - some of it portends more permanent changes. In Arizona, the tall mountains in the southern Sonoran desert known as "sky islands" because they have been welcome refuges from the desert heat for millennia, have already shown unmistakable signs of change.

Predatory insects have started ravaging trees already weakened by record temperatures and fires over the past few years. Animal species such as frogs and red squirrels have been forced to move ever higher up the mountains in search of cooler temperatures, and are in danger of dying out altogether. Mount Lemmon, which rises above the city of Tucson, boasts the southernmost ski resort in the US, but has barely attracted any snow these past few years.

"A lot of people think climate change and the ecological repercussions are 50 years away," Thomas Swetnam, an environmental scientist at the University of Arizona in Tucson, told The New York Times a few months ago. "But it's happening now in the West. The data is telling us that we are in the middle of one of the first big indicators of climate change impacts in the continental United States." Across the West, farmers and city water consumers are locked in a perennial battle over water rights - one that the cities are slowly winning. Down the line, though, there are serious questions about how to keep showers and lawn sprinklers going in the retirement communities of Nevada and Arizona. Lake Powell, the reservoir on the upper Colorado River that helps provide water across a vast expanse of the West, has been less than half full for years, with little prospect of filling up in the foreseeable future.

According to the NOAA's recent report, the West can expect 10-20 per cent less rainfall by mid-century, which will increase air pollution in the cities, kill off trees and water-retaining giant cactus plants and shrink the available water supply by as much as 25 per cent.

In the south-east, the crisis is immediate - and may be alleviated at any moment by the arrival of the tropical storm season. In Georgia, where the driest spring on record followed closely on the heels of a devastating frost, farmers are afraid they might lose anywhere from half to two-thirds of crops such as melons and the state's celebrated peaches. Many cities are restricting lawn sprinklers to one hour per day - and some places one hour only every other day.

The most striking effect of the dry weather has been to expose large parts of the bed of Lake Okeechobee, the vast circular expanse of water east of Palm Beach, Florida, which acts as a back-up water supply for five million Floridians. Archaeologists have had a field day - dredging the soil for human bone fragments, tools, bits of pottery and ceremonial jewellery thought to have belonged to the natives who lived near the lake before the Spanish arrived in the 16th century.

Environmentalists are not entirely upset, because the lake is notoriously polluted with pesticides and other farm products that then poison nearby rivers. River fish stocks in the area are now booming.

Nothing, though, was so strange as the fires that broke out over about 12,000 acres on the northern edge of the lake at the end of May. They were eventually doused by Tropical Storm Barry last weekend. State water managers, however, say it will may take a whole summer of rainstorms, or longer, to restore the lake.

The great Dust Bowl disaster

The Dust Bowl was the result of catastrophic dust storms causing major ecological and agricultural damage to American prairies in the 1930s. The fertile soil of the Great Plains had been exposed by removal of grass during ploughing over decades of ill-conceived farming techniques. The First World War and immense profits had driven farmers to push the land well beyond its natural limits.

When drought hit, the soil dried, became dust, and blew eastwards, mostly in large black clouds. This caused an exodus from Texas, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and the surrounding Great Plains, with more than half a million Americans left homeless in the Great Depression.

[Michael]

Are you OK, antipodes?
They write here that a new storm is coming and around 1,000 people are being evacuated. Is it so?

I'm OK here, its down south and on the coast they are getting it. Newcastle and Maitland, and Sydney too I suppose. I will say though it was a weather pattern that I have not seen before, not that I'm an expert, but I know enough to know it is not common - a great swirl of weather off the east coast out from Sydney. Still I haven't seen much made of that yet.

[erik]

Military plan against Iran is ready'
By YAAKOV KATZ

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1181228588702&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

Predicting that Iran will obtain a nuclear weapon within three years and claiming to have a strike plan in place, senior American military officers have told The Jerusalem Post they support President George W. Bush's stance to do everything necessary to stop the Islamic Republic's race for nuclear power.

Bush has repeatedly said the United States would not allow Iran to "go nuclear."

# Israel successfully launches Ofek 7 spy satellite
# JPost special: US candidates talk tough on Iran

A high-ranking American military officer told the Post that senior officers in the US armed forces had thrown their support behind Bush and believed that additional steps needed to be taken to stop Iran.

Predictions within the US military are that Bush will do what is needed to stop Teheran before he leaves office in 2009, including possibly launching a military strike against its nuclear facilities.

On Sunday, Sen. Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut said the US should consider a military strike against Iran over its support of Iraqi insurgents.

"I think we've got to be prepared to take aggressive military action against the Iranians to stop them from killing Americans in Iraq," he said. "And to me, that would include a strike over the border into Iran, where we have good evidence that they have a base at which they are training these people coming back into Iraq to kill our soldiers."

According to a high-ranking American military officer, the US Navy and Air Force would play the primary roles in any military action taken against Iran. One idea under consideration is a naval blockade designed to cut off Iran's oil exports.

The officer said that if the US government or the UN Security Council decided on this course of action, the US Navy would most probably not block the Strait of Hormuz - a step that would definitely draw an Iranian military response - but would patrol farther out and turn away tankers on their way to load oil.

On Sunday, the Israel Air Force held joint exercises with visiting US pilots, but IDF sources dismissed speculation that the drills were connected to an attack on Iran.

The US officer said that perhaps even more dangerous to Israel and the Western world than Iranian nukes was the possibility that a terrorists cell associated with al-Qaida or global jihad would acquire a highly radioactive "dirty bomb" or a vial of deadly chemical or biological agents. The officer said al-Qaida was gaining a strong foothold in the Middle East and that Israel was being surrounded by global jihad elements in Lebanon, Jordan and Sinai.

"Iran is a state-sponsored type of terrorism that can be dealt with," he said, adding that it was far more difficult to strike at the source of an isolated terrorist cell.

To combat this threat, the US Navy has come up with a plan for a "1,000-ship navy" - a transnational network composed of navies from around the world that would raise awareness of maritime threats and more effectively thwart sea-based terrorism and the illicit transfer of arms by sea.

"The idea is to allow free trade and to prevent criminal and terror activity at sea," the officer said.

A smaller-scale example of the US Navy's vision is NATO's Active Endeavor antiterrorism operation based in Naples. Israel plans to send an officer to be stationed there in the coming months. NATO launched Operation Active Endeavor in wake of 9/11 and has succeeded in bringing together a number of Mediterranean countries to work together in Naples to share information on naval terrorism and suspicious vessels in the region.

[nichi]

it was a weather pattern that I have not seen before, not that I'm an expert, but I know enough to know it is not common

There will be more of this.

Right now, it's absolutely strange here.
Whereas our humidity usually runs 85-95%, it is currently at 52%.   The temperature for the past 2 days has been running at an average 20 degreesF lower than it was and usually does.  The sky is overcast, and the leaves have a drooping, bluish tint. It could be worse, but these things are the fisherman's cues that something is coming. Wish I had a barometric pressure guage.

Yesterday, I read that there were 4 different tropical cyclones forming in the Atlantic: today, all the info on that has disappeared. Is it a function of the new NWS policy to withhold info, or did all those troughs/ridges dissipate? The maps look pretty good.  But something is afoot.

[erik]

What were the signs of approaching Apocalypse described in Bible?
I remember one of them was water turning into blood (red) in rivers and seas.
Here you are: South-East China

[Muffin]

You mean, South-east China will be apocalypsed?
wow

[erik]

You mean, South-east China will be apocalypsed?
wow

Nah, we all will be!
But from China it will come...

[erik]

China passes US as world's biggest CO2 emitter

http://environment.guardian.co.uk/waste/story/0,,2107001,00.html

John Vidal and David Adam
Wednesday June 20, 2007
The Guardian



China has overtaken the US as the biggest producer of carbon dioxide, a development that will increase anxiety about its role in driving man-made global warming and will add to pressure on the world's politicians to reach an agreement on climate change that includes the Chinese economy.

China's emissions had not been expected to overtake those from the US, formerly the biggest polluter, for several years, although some reports predicted it could happen next year.

 But according to figures released yesterday by the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, which advises the Dutch government, soaring demand for coal to generate electricity and a surge in cement production have helped to push China's recorded emissions for 2006 beyond those of the US.

The agency said China produced 6,200m tonnes of CO2 last year, compared with 5,800m tonnes from the US. Britain produced about 600m tonnes. But per head of population, China's pollution remains relatively low, about a quarter of that in the US and half that of the UK.

China's surge to 8% more than the US was helped by a 1.4% fall in the latter's CO2 emissions during 2006, which, analysts say, is down to a slowing US economy.

Jos Olivier, a senior scientist at the agency who compiled the figures, said: "There will still be some uncertainty about the exact numbers, but this is the best and most up to date estimate available. China relies very heavily on coal and all of the recent trends show their emissions going up very quickly."

China's emissions were 2% below those of the US in 2005.

The new figures include only CO2 emissions from fossil fuel burning and cement production. They do not include sources of other greenhouse gases such as methane from agriculture and nitrous oxide from industrial processes.

They exclude other sources of CO2 such as aviation and shipping as well as deforestation, gas flaring and underground coal fires.

Dr Olivier said it was difficult to find reliable estimates for such emissions, particularly from developing countries. But he said including them would be unlikely to topple China from the top spot. "Since China passed the US by 8% [last year] it will be pretty hard to compensate for that with other sources of emissions," he said.

To work out the emissions figures, he used data issued by the oil company BP earlier this month on the consumption of oil, gas and coal across the world during 2006, as well as information on cement production published by the US Geological Survey.

Cement production, which requires huge amounts of energy, accounts for about 4% of global CO2 production from fuel use. China's cement industry, which produces about 44% of world supply, contributes almost 9% of Chinese CO2 emissions.

The announcement came as negotiations to produce a climate treaty to succeed the Kyoto protocol when it expires in 2012 are delicately poised. The US refused to ratify Kyoto partly because it made no demands on China, and a major sticking point of the new negotiations has been finding a way to include both countries, as well as other rapidly developing economies such as India and Brazil. Tony Blair believes the best approach is to develop national markets to cap and trade carbon, which could then be linked.

Earlier this month, China unveiled its first national plan on climate change after two years of preparation by 17 government ministries.

Rather than setting a direct target for the reduction or avoidance of greenhouse gas emissions, it aims to reduce energy consumption per unit of gross domestic product by 20% by 2010 and to increase the share of renewable energy to some 10% as well as to cover roughly 20% of the country's land with forest.

But it stressed that technology and costs are big barriers to achieving energy efficiency. What China needs, said a government spokesman, is international cooperation in helping it move toward a low-carbon economy.

Chinese industries have been hesitant to embrace unproven clean coal technologies which are still in their infancy in developed countries.

[erik]

Slovak Republic 40,1 C in shadow
Czech Republic 36 C (and for the first time in history there were tornadoes there)
Romania 40-45 C
Moldova 40 C
Ukraine 40 C

Computers stop, people die, roads melt, hospitals are over loaded, cars simply break down.

No changes expected for next 10 days.

[erik]

Strongest rains in century

[nichi]

One must stay discreet here, but today, the elected leader of the u s a, who is out of office in the end of 2008, signed an executive order making it possible for the gov't to seize the property and bank accounts of individuals, should those individuals render 'too much protest' about that conflagration over in the land which is the opposite of the middle-west.

Very scary stuff.

Enough said.

[erik]

One must stay discreet here, but today, the elected leader of the u s a, who is out of office in the end of 2008, signed an executive order making it possible for the gov't to seize the property and bank accounts of individuals, should those individuals render 'too much protest' about that conflagration over in the land which is the opposite of the middle-west.

Very scary stuff.

Enough said.

Welcome to the Soviet Union!
How difficult it is for a USAtian to move to Canada?
Get the hell out of there!
That's a clear sign to start moving.

[erik]

A 21st century catastrophe
By Michael McCarthy, Environment Editor
Published: 24 July 2007

http://environment.independent.co.uk/climate_change/article2795635.ece

Flood-ravaged Britain is suffering from a wholly new type of civil emergency, it is clear today: a disaster caused by 21st-century weather.

This weather is different from anything that has gone before. The floods it has caused, which have left more than a third of a million people without drinking water, nearly 50,000 people without power, thousands more people homeless and caused more than £2bn worth of damage - and are still not over - have no precedent in modern British history.

Nothing in the past hundred years, in terms of flooding caused by rainfall, has been as bad. According to the Environment Agency, even the previous worst case, the extensive floods of spring 1947, which were aggravated by the vast snow melt that followed an exceptionally hard winter, has been surpassed.

"We have not seen flooding of this magnitude before," said the agency yesterday. "The benchmark was 1947, and this has already exceeded it." And the 1947 floods were said to have been the worst for 200 years.

Most remarkable of all is the fact that the astonishing picture the nation is now witnessing - whole towns cut off, gigantic areas underwater, mass evacuations, infrastructure paralysed and grotesquely swollen rivers, from the Severn and the Thames downwards not even at their peaks yet - has all been caused by a single day's rainfall. A month's worth and more in an hour. It is obvious that the Government and the civil powers, from Gordon Brown down to the emergency services, are struggling to cope, not only with the sheer physical scale of the disaster itself, but with the very concept of it. It is entirely unfamiliar. It is new. Yet it is exactly what has been forecast for the past decade and more.

No one can yet attribute the flood events of the past week, or indeed, those of June, when Yorkshire suffered what Gloucestershire and Worcestershire are suffering now - again from one single day's rainfall - directly to global warming. All climates have a natural variability which includes exceptional occurrences.

But the catastrophic "extreme rainfall events" of the summer of 2007, on 24 June and 20 July, are entirely consistent with repeated predictions of what climate change will bring.

It is nearly 10 years since the scientists of the UK Climate Impacts Programme first gave their detailed forecast of what global warming had in store for Britain in the 21st century - and high up on the list was rainfall, increasing both in frequency and intensity.

This was thought most likely to happen in winter, with summers predicted to be hotter and dryer. But yesterday Peter Stott of the Met Office's Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research, an author of a new scientific paper linking increases in rainfall to climate change, commented: "It is possible under climate change that there could be an increase of extreme rainfall even under general drying."

The paper by Dr Stott and other authors, reported in The Independent yesterday, detects for the first time a "human fingerprint" in rainfall increases in recent decades in the mid-latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere - that is, it finds they were partly caused by global warming, itself caused by emissions of greenhouse gases.

The public as a whole appears not to have taken the extreme rainfall predictions on board, thinking of climate change in terms of hotter weather. But the science community has been fully aware of it, and has steadily reinforced the warnings.

One of the most important came from a group of experts commissioned to look at the risks by the Chief Scientific Adviser, Sir David King, under the Government's Foresight Programme, in 2004. Their report, Future Flooding, said that unless precautions were taken, more severe floods brought about by climate change could massively increase the number of people and the amount of property at risk. Yet once again, this hardly penetrated the public consciousness.

Amidst all the news of communities being overwhelmed by water yesterday, one very significant announcement, from Gordon Brown and the Secretary of State for the Environment, Hilary Benn, was that the Government is setting up an independent inquiry to look at the flood events of June and July.

Its report will be immensely important and may prove a milestone in terms of the British public's appreciation of the reality of climate change. It will doubtless focus on the key problem in terms of flood response - there is no one minister, or other person, in overall charge - but it may also take a view of the disaster in terms of global warming, and may well come to the conclusion that we are already witnessing the future. The floods of 2007 may eventually be regarded as a wake-up call to the warming climate's rapidly approaching effects.

Nobody saw them coming. But that appears to be the way of a changing climate. In April 1989 Margaret Thatcher, then Prime Minister, gave her Cabinet a seminar on global warming at No 10 and one of the speakers was the scientist and green guru James Lovelock. A reporter asked him afterwards what would be the first signs of global warming. He replied: "Surprises." Asked to explain, he said: "The hurricane of October 1987 was a surprise, wasn't it? There'll be more."

The floods of 2007 were a surprise as well, and if Dr Lovelock is right, there'll be more of them too. Welcome to the weather of the 21st century.

The flood of 1947

The Great Flood of 1947, the previous worst inundation caused by rainfall in Britain, swamped almost all of the rivers in the South, Midlands and the North-east, submerged 700,000 acres of land and caused an estimated £4bn worth of damage (in today's money).

The deluge was predominantly caused by the rapid thaw of snow and ice that had covered much of England after a particularly long and cold winter. The weather patterns that caused the thaw also caused a number of torrential downpours, exacerbating the flooding.

The timing could not have been worse; Britain was still recovering from the war. Rationing was harsh, deprivation widespread and the economy was teetering. What made the catastrophe even more unfortunate was that it occurred before the era of flood insurance.

The flooding started across the South, from Somerset to Kent, as many rivers broke their banks. By 14 March, parts of west and north-east London had been submerged. The next day, the river Thames overflowed its banks at Caversham, near Reading, and around the Lea Valley to the east of London.

By the end of the month, an estimated 100 000 homes had been flooded, hundreds of thousands of people displaced and the year's crops largely wiped out.