Flooding...

Following our conversations this morning about the current and anticipated flooding in England and Wales...

The picture below is of Upton upon Severn, in Worcestershire (the home of the amazing Map Shop) and is one of an In Pictures of the flooding from the BBC. The BBC also has several stories about the flooding (Experts' fear of further flooding, Flood warnings after overnight rain and others...).

Upton upon Severn's website has lots of information and photos of floods from the past ten years, and from 1947. (And as an interesting aside, it seems that Upton is also a plastic-bag free town!)

As I am writing this, there are still 71 flood warnings in place across England and Wales, and 163 flood watches. Several of the flood warnings and watches are on the Trent and the Derwent in Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire. The current flood warnings section of the Environment Agency website is here, but it's also worth having a look at the rest of the Flooding section of the website - there's some good stuff on there about how to prepare for floods, and a review of the Summer 2007 floods.

You can also look at the Flood Risk maps - the same ones that are used by insurance companies to help them to determine premiums.

Also just found the Flood Forum - I've not studied it carefully, but might be worth a look.

Let me know if you find anything else useful or interesting...

Boscastle stuff to follow...

Witches' knickers?!

If you're a regular Geogtastic visitor, you will no doubt already know my feelings about plastic bags... I've written about them a number of times - and Yr8 did some fantastic work on plastic bags last year... But I've never, until this evening, heard them referred to as "witches' knickers"!! According to an excellent new article from the BBC though, that is what they are called in Ireland (where, by the way, they'll cost you 9p each in a supermarket).

Councillors in Brighton and Hove recently voted on a bag ban, asking shops to stop handing them out to customers, and the village of Modbury in Devon have been pleased with their bag ban trial and have just made the ban permanent.

Check out the BBC article to find out more - including 10 arguments FOR the plastic bag... And a great video of A Day in the Life of a Plastic Bag...

Here's a picture of the superb plastic bag collage that 8HCh (now 9NSq) produced last year...