Council orders village to be flooded: locals vow to fight

The villagers of Fairbourne in Cardigan Bay have been ordered to give up their homes and move elsewhere by the council. The authorities want to give up on sea defences and let the sea flood the village - but locals say they will put up a fight.

At the moment the village lies behind a sea wall built during the 19th century, on land that is only a few metres above sea level. Most of the village will be flooded if the sea level rises a metre. As a result, a council study concluded that it would either have to invest substantially in expensive sea defences, or gradually abandon the village - and it chose the latter option.

The council says it will be a slow process, and that the 500 houses will only finally be abandoned to the sea in 50-years' time - during which time residents would be given assistance in moving out. It told the BBC it would work with locals on a solution that everyone was happy with.

Unsurprisingly locals aren't terribly happy. They face losing their homes, and they are worried that they won't be able to move elsewhere to escape the prospect of flooding, because the announcement has destroyed house prices: nobody wants to move into a village that's set to be underwater.

They are preparing to mount a legal battle for compensation for the damage to property prices. The Daily Mail reported that they are arguing the plan is based on highly pessimistic predictions - that sea levels will rise by a metre in the next century - which is double the forecast of a second study. They are currently raising the money for a legal fight - and are 10% of the way to their target.

Sea horrors

We have already seen the terrible destructive power of the sea in recent years. In a serious storm in December 2013 five properties in Hemsby in Norfolk were washed into the sea. The bungalows had been perched near the edge of a cliff top, and dramatic sea erosion saw the cliff washed away.

The North East has lost as many as 32 villages to erosion since the Roman Times, as a strip of land roughly three and a half miles wide on the coast has been washed into the sea. Today the village of Skipsea is being gradually washed into the North Sea, and the Norfolk seaside town of Eccles-on-Sea has now fallen almost entirely into the sea. The church tower succumbed to the waves in 1895.

Flooding along the shore has been equally devastating over the centuries. In Sussex all sorts of villages have been gradually flooded in past centuries. In Lincolnshire too, there are a number of medieval villages and churches which have been reclaimed by the sea.

It is only with modern coastal defences that we have been able to halt the flooding of many areas, and now it appears that the cost of these defences is taking us back to the medieval approach of letting the villages be lost.

Lack of funding

An Environment Agency study in 2014 found that nearly 7,000 properties in England and Wales will be lost to the sea this century - worth more than £1 billion. More than 800 of them will go in the next 20 years (76 of which will be in Cornwall), and there's no compensation scheme in place to protect those hit by the changes.

The Environment Agency has specifically marked out certain area of the country for 'managed retreat', where the sea will be able to reclaim parts of the land. In many cases 'managed retreat' does not affect houses, but the village of Fairbourne is one of the few that will find itself underwater.

It has argued that not every inch of the country can be defended at all costs, and that the movement of the coast is an ongoing process that has happened for centuries. However, this is unlikely to offer the slightest comfort to people who face being forced to abandon their village because the council has deemed it is not worth saving.