LONDON – Brian May is best known as the songwriter and guitar god who supported Freddie Mercury in the British band Queen. He has a PhD in astrophysics and studies asteroids as a hobby. Recently, however, Mr. May drew attention to the kind of earthly problem that plagues ordinary mortals: a flooded basement.
Time Torrential rains flooded London on 12 Julydraining a month of rain in a single day, the sewage backed up in Mr. May’s basement, soiling his carpets with “stinking mud” and ruining photo albums, albums and other precious memories, He told on his Instagram account.
“This is disgusting and actually quite heartbreaking,” Mr May wrote, likening the ordeal to “being occupied” and “being wronged.”
There was a particularly brutal poignancy in the floodwaters that found Mr May’s cellar that came with his elegant home in standard-sized and paid Kensington. For years, he has been a withering critic. rich neighbors digging deep tunnels into the ground to install multi-level basements complete with swimming pools, wine cellars, movie theaters and exotic car dealerships.
To Mr May, these massive underground complexes are not just a symbol of abject excess, but an abuse of their neighbors, who had to suffer from years of head-banging noise as the diggers clawed at London clay. Now he has added a climate charge: oversized basements block underground aquifers and interfere with natural drainage, causing sewer overflows of the kind that hit him.
With his host’s howl, Mr. May managed to bring together two politically resonant issues: the growing threat from extreme weather, which scientists generally agree with, and the environmental impact of years of exaggerated construction projects by London’s super-rich.
“Digging can be seen as environmentally bad or environmentally good, depending on your perspective,” said Tony Travers, an urban affairs specialist at the London School of Economics. “But if you’re building a basement and you’re rich, you better install a pump.”
Professor Travers said Mr. May’s rock star fame and scientific credentials ensured that his warnings would certainly impress people more than any other academic paper or a Cassandra-like politician. The musician’s story focused on London’s vulnerability to the effects of climate change; this is real, though less obvious than in low-lying coastal cities like Miami or Mumbai.
The problem, Professor Travers said, is that London’s weather is often so mild and predictable that a single weather event, no matter how harmful, is unlikely to prompt politicians to take major steps to climate-proof the city.
Alarmed responses to bad weather are an old London tradition: heat waves warn of bent railroad tracks; a light layer of snow paralyzes the streets. But they tend to be washed away by the return of clouds and drizzle.
Extreme Weather
Even if there were a climate calculation, the most obvious remedy – rebuilding the Victorian sewer system built to serve a city less than half the size of London today – would be prohibitively expensive. The city is currently dig a giant tunnel system, NS Thames Tide, to carry the sewage that flows into the river when it rains. This alone costs about 7 billion dollars.
“There’s no doubt that this Victorian infrastructure couldn’t handle that much water,” said Roger Burrows, professor of cities at Newcastle University. “Poor Brian May’s basement is just one example of that.”
Professor Burrows, who wrote about the proliferation of mega-basements in London, said it was a stretch to blame them for overflowing sewers. After all, the city already sits on a lot of excavated underground space, recently Elizabethan lineA new 60-mile railway currently linking Paddington Station with Liverpool Street Station and eventually connecting Heathrow Airport in the west to Essex in the east.
But Professor Burrows added: “The super-rich, and only the rich, have the London gold of St. The fact that they took off the 12 floors of St. Paul’s Cathedral must have had an effect. The water will go somewhere.”
He envisioned an era of noisy “underground politics,” where critics who sneered mega-basements as oligarchs’ toys could now brand them as badass of the climate, the affluent neighborhood equivalent of coal-burning power plants.
Mary Dhonau, a consultant who advises on flood risks, said large basements are just one of several factors that combine to make London more susceptible to flooding. The homeowners had also paved the equivalent of about 22 Hyde Parks — or about 10 Central Parks — in their yards to create parking spaces. This makes the ground less permeable to rainwater, which is then forced into their home, “almost like a waterfall,” he said.
“When you remove that much soil in any one place, you lose places where the water would percolate and seep naturally,” Ms. Dhonau said. “A lot of things are going on in London and when you put them together it makes the flooding much worse.”
As a city sitting on a floodplain, London has already made some important strides. In addition to the Thames Tideway, the planned To be completed by 2025In 1982, the city built a massive retractable barrier on the River Thames to protect the water from storms and tidal waves flowing from the North Sea. It was closed 10 times in its first ten years of operation; in last decade, closed 80 times.
Now, city officials are talking about installing one-metre-high glass barriers along the Thames to prevent the river from crossing existing barricades. They also say they will have to upgrade or strengthen other floodgates. And parts of London are restricting development in flood-prone areas.
The expanding market for basements has nevertheless cooled, in part because local authorities have been more stingy in approving construction. According to Paul Schaaf, Bodrum Design Studio’s partner who designed more than 2,000, homeowners must submit costly hydrology, geology and soil testing reports.
Mr. Schaaf disputes the claim that other people’s basements were causing the flooding in Mr. May’s home. Water, he says, finds a way to flow around such obstacles. As for the basements he designed, technological advances now allow homeowners to install sophisticated pumps to keep their facilities dry. But at one point, Mr. Schaaf admitted it was simply a matter of physics.
“If the water level is a foot above the manhole outside your house, there’s nothing you can do,” he said.
For his part, it looks like Mr May is trying to move on. When asked to elaborate further on his views on basements and flooding, his publisher declined, saying he was busy preparing for the reissue of Mr May’s 1992 album – aptly named during these stormy times – “Return To The Light”.
Anna Joyce contributing reporting.
