water between here and Glastonbury, last ditch measures to save Bridgwater and its 50,000 people
which may well end up flooding another thousand anyway as the water is diverted.
We hear and see stories every day of people working to help each other, neighbours talking to
people in the road they have never spoken to before, complete strangers arriving to help out.
The emergency services and armed forces working round the clock to help with flood defences.
With so much good will and such cooperation going on the acts of greed and cruelty stand out
all the more.
We have seen a few acts of theft, sandbags stolen from one house to be used at another.
We have seen a few acts of incompetence where sand bag walls have been built half way and
left to be flooded both sides.
But where the truly nasty and uncaring attitude comes out is with those councils charging people
for sandbags.
At a time when stories of companies delivering free sand loads and of countless people contributing
what they can to those in need it comes as something more than a disappointment to hear about
councils who are using the opportunity to gouge their own voters.
Christchurch Council in Dorset charging £30 for 5, Torbay Council in Devon, Cornwall council telling
people to buy from a private company at £3 each (which just happens to be the preferred supplier
and no doubt run by friends of the councillors), Torridge District Council in Devon is charging £3.50
per sandbag,
Geoff Brown, Cornwall Council's cabinet member for Homes and Communities, said "it was not a
statutory duty to provide sandbags". He also added that "people had been told where to go to buy
sandbags".
As a comparison you can get poly sand bags from Amazon at£6.99 for a pack of 12.
This raises two points.
Firstly we are now weeks into this cycle of storms, the weather people have been reporting what is
coming our way week by week. Somerset has been flooding for two months now.
All this rain causes flooding, rivers rise. So how is it that we are still seeing people without a ready
stock. How are we still seeing councils who for weeks have been watching the waters rise reporting
they don’t have any or only have 1,000 or so.
How is it that no one anywhere seems to have stopped and thought about this and said, hey all
this rain and flooding, let’s get plenty of sandbags in.
2003. 2007, 2012, 2013 and now 2014. Floods and more floods and yet no one seems to have learned
a damn thing. Lots of rain causes floods, the same areas which are vulnerable to flood will flood. So
why after weeks of heavy rain are so many councils unprepared.
Secondly. What sort of complete and utter money grabbing greedy scum tries to make a profit under
these conditions?
What sort of council person thinks it is acceptable to charge people for protection against a flood.
What sort of council thinks they don’t have a duty to protect the people of their region, Cornwall I am
looking at you here, no statutory duty indeed, what happened to your responsibility to all those
council tax payers, what happened to your simply human decency?
£30 for a pack of 5 bags, £3 a bag, £3.50 a Bag. Amazon is selling them for between 50p and £1 each
delivered for free with another item or for larger orders.
These council bags, are they hand crafted by virgins on some distant isle? Are they woven with gold
thread? Do you sleep at night after trying to rip off their own tax payers in the middle of a disaster or
do you simply not care about people suffering in your region.
Well ladies and gentlemen of Dorset, Devon and Cornwall. Please remember when your councils stand
for re-election next, remember that they tried to charge you, remember that they think they have no
duty to help you when the flood water is at your doors.
When next they ask you to vote for them, remember how they behaved when you most needed them.
And vote the scum out of office.