Prime Minister Andy Burnham has warned that flooding could follow the wildfires sweeping the country. He made the warning as he visited the scene of a fire in Stourbridge in the West Midlands, where residents were forced to evacuate.
A total of 54 people have been treated by paramedics, including 19 who were admitted to hospital, after wildfires broke out across the region.
Prime Minister's warning
Speaking to broadcasters on Friday afternoon, Mr Burnham paid tribute to the work of firefighters, and added: “We might be in for a wet autumn and winter straight after this, because of El Nino and some of the issues there, which was reported to Cobra. So, after fire could come floods.
“We have to face up to the changing climate. I think we need a different debate about that. There’s no point denying where we are. We need to face up to it. We need more clean energy. We need to see that transition accelerate. Those are all of the issues that, you know, are right now in discussion.
“But the Cobra meeting earlier this week, I think has enabled us to mobilise resource today to individuals, to communities, and to our fire and rescue services, and we’re very, very grateful to them.”
Met Office forecasts
Mr Burnham later told the BBC that the Met Office believes the dry spell will last until the end of September, when some rain is expected.
He also told the broadcaster: “Maybe some rainfall, but not as much as we need, and then we are heading straight into a very, very wet latter part of the year, where the risk of flooding will be maybe greater because of the dry ground conditions.
“At the moment, fire and rescue services are not set up for flooding properly, and again, these are questions that I have to take away, and you know I won’t shy away from them.”
Climate drivers
Met Office climate spokesman Grahame Madge said it was a “tremendously tricky job” to work out which climate drivers will be the most dominant ahead of autumn and winter.
Mr Madge told the Press Association: “But the Prime Minister is perfectly right in what he said, in terms of there is a known association between strong El Nino events and a wet autumn.
“It’s important to highlight that El Nino is a pattern of natural climate variability – it’s not linked to climate change per se.
“It can accentuate other climate signals, such as a warmer atmosphere, it can hold more moisture, all of that, but it’s not an artefact of climate change itself.”
Discussing the difficulty of predicting weather months in advance, he added: “The challenge for forecasters is the fact that there are a number of competing drivers.
“Another big driver of what happens in autumn in the North Atlantic is what’s happening in the tropical Atlantic with the hurricane season.
“So, our forecasters have got an extremely difficult job of trying to tease out all those different drivers and work out which one will weigh out.”
Food security concerns
Alistair Carmichael, the Liberal Democrat MP who chairs the Commons environment committee, told the Press Association on Friday the current drought is “desperately worrying”, but he also warned of the impact flooding can have on the UK’s food security.
Speaking to PA, he said: “Water engineers will always tell you that Britain has a water management problem, not a water resilience problem. That means that we’re not good at harvesting it when we’ve got too much of it, and then we keep losing too much of it when we’ve not got enough of it.
“From the point of view of food security, food production, fields in the late winter and early spring will be under a foot of water, which the Environment Agency then pumps out to sea, and that water is not then available for use later in the year when farmers need it for irrigating crops or providing food for livestock.”
