What's causing the floods?
Ponty and north Wales were flooded quite badly, and I often drive along one of the main streets that were pretty badly affected. There was a whole 20 minute segment about it on the 18:00 news. I'd never seen anything like that happen round there before.
A slag heap that's saturated with rain can result in a very bad landslide, a highly dense sludge that can destroy everything in its path. One of those came down at the end of a residential street, and thankfully nobody was killed. There are still tons of slag on the mountains round here, today masked by grass and vegetation.
One thing we do know is the flooding wasn't caused by climate change, because we know the rivers overflowed after a typical rainy day - we usually get a lot more rain during November. The rivers are overflowing more frequently these days, as if there's something between the Valleys and Cardiff stemming the flow of water into the Bristol Channel. The rivers should also overflow into flood plains, many of which had been concreted over.
The Flood of 1607
My partner had been looking forward all week to watching the documentary about the Great Flood of 1607. Maybe it should be called the 'Singular Flood of 1607', because nothing like it occurred before or after, in recorded history.
In the early hours, in January 1607, people living near the mouth of the Bristol Channel were woken by a storm. This was soon followed by powerful waves that overpowered the sea defences. Within a few hours, towns, villages and hamlets, miles inland, across the entire region were under 5ft of water. One can still see markers for the water level in some churches around the region today.
The disappointing thing about the documentary was it didn't spend more than a few minutes exploring the hypotheses about what caused the flood. The commonly accepted hypothesis is the flood was a confluence of the Moon's position and high air pressure over the sea, but that seems unlikely because the disaster was a singular occurrence. The other hypothesis is the waves were a tsunami caused by an Earthquake or underwater landslide off the coast.