from Sunday Herald, 19 June 2011
An expert on flooding has been banned from criticising Scottish ministers for ignoring the widespread chaos that could be caused by a storm surge in the Firth of Forth.
The leading insurance and risk specialist, David Crichton, was due to tell a government conference about adapting to climate change this week that Scotland’s vital supplies of fuel, food and power would be seriously disrupted by a flood in the Forth.
He was going to accuse ministers of “denial and complacency” because they had failed to consider the need to build a flood barrier to protect the oil and gas facilities, the food distribution depot and the big power station that line the estuary.
But hours after the Sunday Herald started to make inquiries about his criticisms, he was instructed by organisers to withdraw them and focus instead on giving practical insurance advice to businesses.
“They told me it was not suitable,” Crichton said. “I thought it was too good to be true to let me say what I wanted. I have no axe to grind, no bosses to suffer.”
The conference is due to be opened in Edinburgh on Thursday by the climate change minister, Stewart Stevenson. It is being organised by the government-funded Scottish Climate Change Impacts Partnership.
Crichton, who has been 25 years in the insurance industry, advises governments and international agencies about flood risks. He is an honorary professor at University College London, a research fellow at the University of Dundee and lives near Perth.
His pre-prepared presentation to the conference warns that the consequences of a credible flood in the Forth would be disastrous, and could end up causing billions of pounds worth of damage.
“Imagine a situation in which the whole of Scotland suddenly has power cuts, no petrol or diesel supplies, no gas, and only limited food supplies,” he says. “Imagine this continues for months.”
Disaster will come if a five-metre storm surge similar to that in 1999 happened at high tide, Crichton warns. The petrochemical complex at Grangemouth, which handles 40% of UK oil supplies, could be flooded.
A nearby grocery distribution hub that supplies supermarkets across Scotland and northern England could also be knocked out, along with Longannet power station, near Kincardine, which generates a quarter of Scotland’s electricity. Some 6,000 people are also at risk from flooding.
Flood maps published last week by the Scottish Environment Protection Agency (Sepa) show that Grangemouth and Longannet are vulnerable to a flood expected to occur once every 200 years in the Forth. Sepa puts the average cost of potential damage at £230 million a year, but Crichton argues that the real costs could be much higher.
“The next stage should be to work out the cost of the loss of these facilities, not just the direct local costs, but the consequential losses to the national economy from widespread power cuts and shortages of fuel,” he was planning to tell delegates.
“None of the scenarios considered when the Scottish government was planning the new Forth crossing included any mention of flood risk or the possibility of combining a crossing with a flood barrier.”
Crichton advocates building a four-kilometre flood barrier across the Forth just upriver from Rosyth, which could carry road and rail traffic. “This would have been much cheaper than the proposed new bridge,” he suggests.
Dr Richard Dixon, director of the environmental group, WWF Scotland, argued it was important to listen to Crichton’s warning. “His expert thoughts on the threats we might be facing seem exactly the kind of thing this conference needs to hear about,” he said.
“It is puzzling that, after inquiries from the Sunday Herald, delegates are now going to miss out. It would be tragic if we ignored this threat until we were in the midst of a major disaster.”
Dixon argued that Scotland ought to be planning a “managed retreat” from areas around the Forth, Clyde and Tay that were prone to flooding. But a Forth flood barrier was also “an idea that needs to be seriously considered”, he said.
The Scottish Climate Change Impacts Partnership stressed that it was “standard practice” to request speakers who departed from their briefs to change their talks. “It was judged that the full presentation received from David Crichton does not adequately cover the subject matter which was identified in the brief to him,” said a spokesman.
“Specifically, we feel that David Crichton’s presentation does not sufficiently cover issues in relation to the risks of climate change to business and the role of insurance in adapting to climate change, as we originally requested. We have therefore asked that he amend his presentation.”
According to the Scottish government, a tidal barrage was rejected in 2007 because of concerns about the "considerable impact" on the environment and shipping. "We liaise closely with key infrastructure operators to assess risk, and develop robust, proportionate mitigation measures to issues, such as flooding," said a government spokesman. “The Scottish government is not involved in deciding the suitability of presentation content for this conference.”
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