Private Island: Why Britian Now Belongs to Someone Else (14 page)

As it happens, the Environment Agency's main flood-warning control room for the west of England is on an industrial estate in Tewkesbury. But the town doesn't use flood sirens, and at the time the agency's archaic website used text, rather than maps, for its warnings. Residents got an automatic phone message from the agency warning of floods only if they'd signed up for one, and on average only two-fifths of people at risk did sign up. Besides, as Anthony Perry, flood-risk manager for Gloucestershire, explained, the key to the 2007 floods was the water pouring off the Cotswolds, and the agency didn't give warnings for those small, nippy rivers. ‘The limitations are small watercourses, where they respond very quickly to flash flooding,' he told me. ‘It's technically very difficult to provide a flood-warning service to give a two-hour lead-in time. We don't provide any flood warnings for the Swilgate or the Chelt at the moment and that's something we want to do. But it's difficult. Because of the speed. The rainfall that hits a rain gauge will be into the system and within the town within a few hours. It's something we're looking at now: is two hours better than nothing?'
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The Environment Agency's flood warning for Tewkesbury – ‘Flooding of homes and businesses is expected. Act now!' – didn't come until 6.53 p.m. on Friday. A severe flood warning – ‘Act now! Severe flooding is expected with extreme danger to life and property' – followed at 5.45 a.m. on Saturday. By that time, many residents had already been flooded; others had been woken by the sound of rescue helicopters, and the first person in Tewkesbury to die as a result of the floods, nineteen-year-old Mitchell Taylor, had drowned while taking a short cut past the abbey on his way home from the pub. Passers-by heard him yelling for help – he couldn't swim – and tried in vain, via mobile phone and the 999 centre, to guide a helicopter to him. His body was found a week later by an Italian hovercraft crew.

Overnight, the waters around Mythe rose with a speed that staggered the flood specialists. Perry showed me a chart plotting the level of the River Severn at the bridge next to the waterworks, sourced from an agency gauge. A red line charted the story of the floods of winter 2000; from a high base the river rose gradually over two days, levelled off for a week, and then slowly sank back. The blue line showing what happened in July 2007 was quite different. The Severn was running relatively low before the rains. At 1.48 a.m. on Saturday, 21 July, the gauge readings began to shoot up almost vertically. In the next seven hours, the water rose 4.4 metres. Soon afterwards, with the water still rising, the gauge broke.

Severn Trent subscribes to the agency's flood warnings and was monitoring them on Friday at its operations centre in Birmingham. But as the rivers swelled, the company and the Environment Agency, without realising it, weren't understanding each other. Despite the agency's severe flood warning at 5.45 a.m. on Saturday, Severn Trent still refused to believe its waterworks would flood. Throughout the day, the company called the agency, asking for updated predictions of what level the river would peak at. The agency obliged; and, since their predictions were lower than Severn Trent's flood point of 12.52
metres, the company didn't feel the need to warn anyone that they were at risk, or what the consequences would be. Severn Trent argues that it based its actions that Saturday on those agency predictions of the exact peak flood levels through the day. The Environment Agency maintains that the predictions were provided as a courtesy, and that what mattered was the earlier severe flood warning.

Perry showed me the agency's flood map for Tewkesbury. ‘Half of the [waterworks] site is under water in a one in a hundred year flood,' he said. ‘The map shows that. So where we issue a severe flood warning, it is to say half of that site will be flooded. We try to educate [Severn Trent] about what we are here to provide and we made clear to them that we are not here to provide millimetre-accurate warnings at Mythe. We issued a severe flood warning, which includes them, and we expect them to take action. After the 2000 flood, when Severn Trent came close to taking action, there's a requirement for them to have a business continuity plan.'

What Perry meant by ‘business continuity plan' was an alternative to Mythe if Mythe failed. But Severn Trent didn't have one. Not until 9.41 p.m. on Saturday night, almost sixteen hours after the severe flood warning, did the company alert Gloucestershire's fire and rescue service to the danger to the waterworks. By that time it was too late. Niall Hall, who was on duty in the Environment Agency's control room on Saturday night, remembers getting a phone call from the fire brigade saying ‘Mythe's going to go under.' ‘They were saying they had high-volume pumps, where could they pump the water to? I said: “Nowhere, unless you've got hoses that can go four miles.” '

Hall recalls a phone conversation with staff at Severn Trent's HQ that night. ‘They were panicking,' he said.

‘They were struggling,' Perry said. ‘They didn't understand how it all worked, really.'

‘If you've got infrastructure by a river, there's a risk,' Hall said.

‘But it's what level of risk,' said Perry. ‘It's having plans, in case, isn't it.'

At midnight, Severn Trent bowed to the inevitable, and at 1.45 a.m. began a controlled shutdown of the plant, to save electrical equipment when the inundation happened. At 2.16 a.m., water gushed in from the Avon side, followed shortly afterwards by water from the Severn side. With the shutdown complete the flooded site was abandoned at 6 a.m.

When he appeared before MPs after the emergency, the head of Gold Command and Gloucestershire's chief constable, Timothy Brain, complained that he and his staff hadn't been told of the Mythe crisis until seven hours after flood water had entered the treatment works. They had no idea that a water cut-off was even a risk until it was about to happen. Severn Trent executives who gave evidence at Gloucestershire County Council's inquiry into the floods said they would have needed at least two days' warning of a severe flood for a temporary barrier to be put up in time to save the waterworks. Yet when, between Sunday and Monday, a similar emergency faced the National Grid at a vital electricity substation in Walham – the failure of which would have triggered the evacuation of half a million people from Gloucestershire – the emergency services and the military managed to complete a temporary barrier to hold back peaking floods less than fifteen hours after the Grid first contacted the fire service for help. On that timescale, had Severn Trent asked for help earlier, Mythe could have been saved.

‘The critical thing Severn Trent failed to do was to let Gold Command know in time to protect that vital piece of infrastructure, as National Grid did for Walham,' said Martin Horwood, MP for Cheltenham. ‘At Walham, Gold Command brought in the army and protected it, not with much time to spare, but they protected it. Severn Trent never joined up the dots.'

On average, a Severn Trent customer uses 138 litres of water a day. The washing machine, the bath and shower, the tooth-brushing
and shaving, the dishwasher and washing-up, the flushing of toilets, the drinking, the cooking, the car-wash, the dozens of times a Briton unthinkingly turns on the tap to wet a cloth or wash hands or boil a kettle: it adds up. As news spread on Sunday that mains water was going to be cut off to much of Gloucestershire, householders rushed to wash clothes and fill baths. Normally the reservoirs would have stored enough for a day and a half, but by noon water was pouring out of Churchdown reservoir so fast the meters could no longer register it, and early on Sunday evening the taps started to cough, rattle and go dry. The phone-tappers, web spooks and cyberwarriors of GCHQ were forced to scale back operations at their new doughnut-shaped building on the edge of Cheltenham. Surrounded by the most advanced technology, reaching out across the globe, GCHQ's five thousand staff could no longer go to the lavatory.

Severn Trent had contingency plans to deal with water cutoffs. Government regulations say the private water industry as a whole should be able to supply 200,000 people with ten litres of water per person per day for seven days. Severn Trent had to supply 350,000 people for between seven and twelve days, and the company soon realised ten litres wasn't enough. One researcher at the post-flood inquiries said her work in African communities dependent on hand-carried well water showed twenty litres was the minimum needed for drinking, cooking and basic hygiene.

The company began buying bottled water in industrial quantities, and scoured the country for bowsers to augment its own depleted stocks. It thought it would need 900; by the end of the crisis it had 1,400 in place, effectively the country's entire inventory. In the early days, the distribution of bottled water was chaotic, and Severn Trent's efforts to keep the bowsers filled were unsuccessful. On Monday, in Longlevens in Gloucester, amid panic-buying, arbitrageurs were spivving water in the Co-op car park for £4 a bottle. The county council was calling contractors in the US, trying to get supplies of a disposable toilet designed
for hunters and hikers called a wag bag. On Tuesday, a sixty-nine-year-old woman in Bishop's Cleeve told the
Gloucestershire Echo
: ‘We've only got three-quarters of a bucket of water left. We're having to flush the loo with pond water. If we can get drinking water it'll be OK. We just have to give up on washing.'

The big tankers the company normally used turned out to be useless in the narrow, winding streets of Gloucestershire villages, and smaller tankers were in short supply. Severn Trent cobbled together a mixed fleet of beer, milk and water trucks, all of which turned out to have different connectors. A cross-county bowser audit at dawn on Thursday, four days after the flood, found that three-fifths had been drained, vandalised or stolen. Some later turned up on eBay.

The company bodged fixes, opened its corporate wallet – by that Friday it was buying six million litres of water a day, equivalent to the usual daily bottled water consumption for the whole of Britain – and, crucially, turned to the army, which took over much of the organisation and distribution work from a base at Cheltenham Racecourse. The fact that there don't appear to have been any serious public health consequences came down to three factors: Severn Trent trucked special deliveries of water to hospitals and other essential users; the army; and the ad hoc, unpaid generosity of neighbours and volunteers like Chuck Pavey, who helped the elderly and infirm get their water. Tony Wray, who took over as Severn Trent's chief executive after the emergency ended, told MPs: ‘We were absolutely inundated with the sheer scale of this.'

Ofwat, the quango regulating the private water industry in England and Wales, accepted Severn Trent's argument that it should be excused the normal compensation rule – which would have given £110 to a household cut off for ten days – on the basis that the floods were an exceptional event, outside the company's control. Tony Wray, who wouldn't be interviewed, has argued that even if Severn Trent had wanted to invest in a back-up to Mythe before the floods, Ofwat would have rejected the plan as
a bad use of the company's scarce capital resources. Yet, like all England's private water companies, Severn Trent would have more money to invest in rebuilding and improving the water system if it didn't pay out such hefty sums in dividends each year to the shareholders who own it. In 2007, the year Severn Trent failed its customers catastrophically for the lack of a £25 million pipeline, then declined to compensate them, it handed over the equivalent of £38.65 per customer to its shareholders in dividends. Its biggest shareholder, Barclays Bank, got £5.2 million. That year, Barclays' profits were £7.08 billion.

Supporters of the existing private water regime argue that, in order to build and renovate facilities in a market economy, a company has to borrow from somewhere; dividend payments, the argument runs, are just the price you pay shareholders for permanently ‘borrowing' their cash, in the same way interest payments are the price you pay banks for temporarily borrowing theirs. (This is a very crude explanation of the difference between ‘equity finance' and ‘debt finance' corporate financiers spend so much time talking about.) That reasoning might work if Severn Trent were an Internet start-up, or a drugs company staking its all on a novel medicine. As we shall see, as an argument about a British water monopoly, it fails.

Edward Warner Shewell, who did most to get the Mythe waterworks built, was a long-lived Conservative patriarch whose career spanned most of the nineteenth century. With his wife, Emma, he raised sixteen children at their house in Royal Crescent, Cheltenham. For many years, with the help of the Tory majority on Cheltenham's Board of Commissioners – the precursor to the local council – he managed to sustain a glaring conflict of interest, being both chairman of the commissioners and chairman of the private water company that had a stranglehold on Cheltenham's water supply. It was particularly remarkable because, for decades, the town and the company were bitterly at odds over where their water should come from.

Many of Shewell's children died before he did. His commercial and political machinations were regularly interrupted by dismal despatches from far corners of the Empire. His brother Frederick, a colonel in the Eighth Hussars, is said to have ridden in the Charge of the Light Brigade with an open Bible on his saddle. Perhaps his contemporaries saw something biblical in the fact that Shewell, so instrumental in getting the Mythe waterworks built, lost three of his sons at sea, two of them drowned.

Water-wise, Cheltenham in the early nineteenth century was, despite being a spa town, not unlike one of the less developed towns in the poor world now, heavily dependent on wells and springs. Unlike present-day Africa, however, which draws well-intentioned rich world aid agencies and profit-seeking rich world multinationals, post-Napoleonic Cheltenham had only localist solutions to its water problems: local entrepreneurs and local campaigners for a cleaner, healthier, more socially just town. The origins of the Mythe waterworks lie in the first avatar of Cheltenham's town commissioners, set up in 1786 to charge the gentry a rate to pay for street lighting and road maintenance. Because the streets needed to be cleaned, and because this demanded a reliable water supply, in 1824 the commissioners set up a private firm – the Cheltenham Waterworks Company – to do the job. Funded by a mixture of shares and loans, the company built a reservoir on the eastern outskirts of Cheltenham, laid a network of pipes into the town and began selling water.