Flood-ravaged Britain is suffering from a wholly new type of civil emergency, it is clear today: a disaster caused by 21st-century weather. This weather is different from anything that has gone before. The floods it has caused, which have left more than a third of a million people without drinking water, nearly 50,000 people without power, thousands more people homeless and caused more than £2bn worth of damage – and are still not over – have no precedent in modern British history. Nothing in the past hundred years, in terms of flooding caused by rainfall, has been as bad. According to the Environment Agency, even the previous worst case, the extensive floods of spring 1947, which were aggravated by the vast snow melt that followed an exceptionally hard winter, has been surpassed. ‘We have not seen flooding of this magnitude before,’ said the agency yesterday. ‘The benchmark was 1947, and this has already exceeded it.’ And the 1947 floods were said to have been the worst for 200 years. Most remarkable of all is the fact that the astonishing picture the nation is now witnessing – whole towns cut off, gigantic areas underwater, mass evacuations, infrastructure […]