Waterloo, London Bridge and King’s Cross are among 57 Tube stations that are at risk of being being submerged. Others at risk include; Victoria,

Could we suffer like New York?

The New York subway was swamped by Hurricane Sandy in 2012. Simply heavy rain overwhelmed everything and all the accepted preventative measures and in place systems. The report goes on to warn that: “The rapid nature of flooding events often produces high safety consequences.”

With a total of 3.5m passenger journeys a day across the network, a severe flood could be extremely disruptive to the running of the city – as well as potentially fatal for a huge number of commuters caught up in such an incident.

Closer to home and near where I live, they have been pumping out the ground works on a new housing estate for weeks. And over the course of a few weeks you get more rain.

The area is obviously going to be a flood risk  with unpredictable and sudden rain a new and ever present consideration . Planning for the unexpected is surely going to be the new normal? Drainage and waterproofing systems are going to have to cope with known and highly probable sudden increases in run off, ground and standing water.

Designing for the known historical conditions and the foreseeable unknown conditions is going to be the new test and the new normal.

Westminster and Leicester Square.