British Prime Minister David Cameron on Sunday sent hundreds more troops into northern England to help exhausted residents and emergency workers fight back rising river waters that have inundated towns and cities after weeks of heavy rain.
Cameron said the flooding is “unprecedented” and vowed to do everything possible to protect people and their property, as the damage spread to the major cities York, Leeds and Manchester.
He said that protective systems and contingency plans would be reviewed because the frequency of such extreme weather events seems to be on the rise.
Photo: Reuters
Weeks of persistent rainfall has saturated the ground and swollen the rivers to record levels, leaving entire swathes of northern England, and smaller parts of Wales and Scotland, vulnerable. Several hundred flood warnings remain in effect.
There have been no fatalities or serious injuries reported, but hundreds of people have been evacuated from houses and apartments in York, 320km north of London, where 3,500 properties are judged to be at risk. Emergency crews worked extra shifts to try to restore power to roughly 7,500 blacked-out homes in the greater Manchester and Lancashire areas.
British Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Liz Truss said flood protection systems put in place in recent years were unable to cope with the record-high river levels.
“In Lancashire every single river was at a record-high,” she said. “In Yorkshire we have seen some rivers a meter higher than they have ever been before. Clearly, in the light of that, we will be reviewing our flood defenses.”
Several hundred people had been evacuated the day before in the West Yorkshire and Lancashire regions and officials said thousands had lost power. The number of people affected continues to grow as flooding spreads and impacts cities as well as villages and towns.
A picturesque 200-year-old pub, The Waterside, in the Greater Manchester area, collapsed and part of the structure was swept away by the River Irwell. Rising river levels also threatened downtown Manchester and police dealt with a ruptured gas main and small fires believed to have been caused by the flooding.
The UK Environment Agency urged residents to remain vigilant because more “severe” flooding was expected yesterday.
The agency used its Twitter feed to tell people to be cautious, tweeting that driving or walking in flowing flood waters could be life-threatening.
Rescue crews have been using boats to help remove people from their homes and in some cases from their nearly submerged vehicles.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema