Poison rivers may be grim legacy of flood disaster

DANGEROUS chemicals released during centuries of heavy industry could be polluting Yorkshire again after being dredged up in last summer's floods, new research reveals.

Academics at a three-day conference looking at the effects of last June's torrential downpour warned that flooding would become an increasingly important issue in the years and decades to come – and that only widescale change to the way we live will help mitigate the devastating impact.

Floodplains need to be abandoned, new lakes created, hill farming scaled back, new homes built to the highest environmental standards and woodland regrown as Britons stop waging war with nature and allowed the country to return to its natural state, they argued.

And farmers need to be made "custodians of the countryside", being adequately compensated for allowing flood waters on to their land to ruin their crops in order to save towns and cities further downstream, the academics said.

Most pressing of all, however, could be dealing with the long-term effects of the recent floods.

Sheffield Hallam University academic Ian Rotherham, who co-ordinated the conference, said: "Our research has shown that extreme floods can release dangerous pollution locked up in valley-bottom sediments from centuries of heavy industry.

"In some parts of the country like South and West Yorkshire this may mean heavy metals and other pollutants released from deposits to be spread far and wide across floodlands downstream.

"These could be farming or housing lands and clearly raises concerns."

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