There's a hosepipe ban on. Reservoirs are well down. Half of England is formally in drought. And here I am writing about flooding, which I accept is a slightly mad thing to be doing in August. But there is a reason I’m getting my ducks in a row.
I get the same messages every winter. Water across a road, water at a doorstep, water somewhere it's never been before, and attached to it a perfectly reasonable question: why weren't the drains cleared?
It's a fair thing to ask, and it's one I sometimes take time off work to fix with my own hands. It just isn't going to be the answer this year, and I'd rather explain that now than in the middle of a January downpour when nobody wants a lecture on soil science from their councillor. Stay with me.
Baked ground doesn't behave like soil
Most of us have already seen this happen without noticing it. Empty a watering can onto a lawn in April and it vanishes. Do the same in late August and the water beads, runs sideways and pools at the low point by the fence.
Dry clay shrinks, cracks, and forms a crust that sheds water instead of taking it in. Soil hydrophobicity is the technical term. The first heavy rain after a long drought doesn't soak away. It runs, quickly, and reaches the drainage network all at once rather than seeping through over several hours.
That's the whole problem, really. Drains are sized for a rate of arrival. Drought doesn't change how much rain falls in a storm — it changes how fast that rain gets to the gully.
None of this is me being gloomy for the sake of a newsletter, incidentally. The Environment Agency has been saying it out loud all year: flooding during drought is entirely possible, flash flooding especially, because parched ground can't cope with an intense downpour.
Where we actually are
The summer's numbers have been remarkable, and not in a way anyone should enjoy.
July was the driest on record for England — around a tenth of the long-term average rainfall for the month. By the end of it, seven Environment Agency areas were in drought, covering just over half the country. Reservoir storage across England is down to roughly 69 per cent, with a handful classed as exceptionally low. At one point we had seven weeks running with under 10mm of rain nationally, and parts of the south east managed less than a single millimetre.
The Agency's phrase for it is a "flash drought". Not a slow decline but very low rainfall and sustained heat doing the damage fast. Second summer in a row for much of southern England, which is the detail I'd underline. One dry summer is weather. Two in a row on the back of the warmest year the UK has ever recorded starts to look like something you'd want to plan around.
So: the ground across Oxfordshire is currently about as absorbent as a car park.
The El Niño bit, with caveats
I want to be careful here, because I don't think councillors should oversell a weather forecast to win an argument.
A very strong El Niño is developing in the Pacific. In simple terms, El Niño is a periodic warming of the surface waters of the tropical Pacific which, because that ocean is vast enough to shove the atmosphere around, ends up nudging weather patterns across the whole plane
NOAA's Climate Prediction Center now puts the odds of a very strong event through autumn and winter 2026-27 above 90 per cent, with some model runs heading into territory that would be off the historical chart entirely. The World Meteorological Organization has flagged the same thing, with unusually high confidence for this stage of the year.
What that means for a market town in South Oxfordshire is genuinely less clear than what it means for California. We sit at the fuzzy edge of El Niño's reach. Some seasonal models point to a wetter, more Atlantic-driven autumn across northwest Europe, westerlies dragging moisture in. Others suggest El Niño winters tend to turn blocked and cold later on. Both can happen in one season.
Here's what I'm comfortable saying. A strong El Niño loads the dice towards a more disturbed, more energetic autumn and winter. It doesn't promise anyone a flood. It just means that if you were hoping for six quiet months of gentle drizzle to let the water table recover slowly, that isn't the bet the models are currently making.
And gentle is exactly what we need. What looks likelier is that the rain we've been missing since May turns up in a smaller number of bigger events, onto ground that can't take it.
It won't be the drains
Let me head this one off, because it'll be said early and it'll be said loudly, probably by people on the Internet who (should) know better.
Over the last financial year the county council ran the biggest drainage programme in its recent history. Every gully and catchpit in Oxfordshire, all 147,000 or so, inspected, and the overwhelming majority cleaned. It cost £2.6 million, on the back of an extra £1.5 million approved in the budget, and it took around 2,346 tonnes of silt out of our drainage network. Crews went from six to twelve and worked evenings to get at drains on the busier roads.
And it isn't a one-off. We've gone from cleaning gullies once every four years to cleaning them annually. Once every four years was what we inherited, from the Conservatives. That was bad. Annual is the standard now, and it's the biggest single change to how this county handles surface water in a very long time.
The few that couldn't be reached were mostly parked cars and seized lids, and they're flagged for another visit. The ones that turned out to be broken rather than merely full went onto a repair list, which is why in July another £4 million was signed off to fix and replace defective gullies over the next two years.
I'm not claiming perfection here. I could walk you to spots in my patch in north Abingdon where the drainage still isn't right, and I've got the casework to prove it.
But "nobody cleaned the drains" stopped being a true description of Oxfordshire a while ago, and I'd gently ask people to retire it. And it won't be the reason for flooding.
And it won't simply be "the new estates"
This one's more nuanced, and you're getting the honest version rather than the easy one.
New developments have to manage surface water so the rate of discharge doesn't exceed what the site produced as a greenfield. That's what the attenuation ponds and swales and permeable surfacing and underground storage crates are all for. Designed and built properly, a scheme really does hold water back and let it go slowly. On paper a new estate should be neutral or better.
Where problems turn up, they turn up in the gaps. Whether the drainage got built as approved rather than quietly value-engineered on site. Whether anyone's adopted and is maintaining it come year fifteen.
Whether the cumulative effect of four separate schemes in one catchment was ever modelled together, or just one application at a time, which is generally how planning works and generally where the trouble starts. Plus the quiet one that never appears in any planning application at all: front gardens disappearing under hardstanding, a few hundred at a time, across the whole town.
Scrutinise developers by all means, and I'll carry on doing it. Just don't let it become the entire explanation. Blame the new estate at the edge of town and you'll miss the fact that the old part of town is sitting on ground that's been baked solid since May.
The bit underneath all of it
Now, I know how some of you feel about this next section, and I'd ask you to read it anyway.
I'm not going to tell you what to think about global politics or net zero targets or anybody's flight habits. I want to talk about one narrow, boring, entirely local question: has the rain that falls on Oxfordshire changed, and does that matter for whether your street floods? Because the answer to both is yes, and you can arrive at it without signing up to a single thing you don't want to sign up to.
Start with what's simply been measured. Not modelled, not projected. Measured, at weather stations across Britain, some of them running since Victoria was on the throne.
The most recent decade's winter half-year, October to March, has come in 13 per cent wetter than the 1961-1990 period. Very wet winter months — the ones with double the old average rainfall — have roughly doubled in frequency over the same comparison.
The number of months where a county records at least twice its normal monthly rainfall has gone up by over half. Last winter, 2025-26, was England's eighth wettest since records began in 1836, and southern England's fourth wettest. The West Midlands, Cornwall and Leicestershire all had their wettest winter ever recorded.
And here's the part that matters most for a piece about drains: it isn't that we're getting more rain spread evenly across the year. The increase is almost entirely in the winter half-year. Summers aren't getting notably wetter. So the pattern is more water arriving in the six months when the ground is least able to take it, in bigger individual dumps.
Now, the obvious objection. It flooded in Abingdon in 2007. It flooded in 1947. The Thames has been coming out of its banks since long before anybody had a car or a gas boiler. All true, and I'd never pretend otherwise. Nobody serious claims flooding was invented recently.
The claim is about frequency and intensity, which is a different thing entirely. A one-in-fifty-year event becoming a one-in-twenty-year event doesn't feel like a change while you're living through it. It just feels like bad luck twice. But it's the difference between drainage that copes and drainage that doesn't.
The second objection is the better one: fine, it's wetter, but that's just weather patterns wobbling about, the way they always have.
Until recently that was a genuinely open question. In February this year a Newcastle University study went at it directly, taking UK winter rainfall from 1901 to 2023 and separating out how much of the increase comes from shifting weather patterns and how much comes from a warmer atmosphere simply holding more water. The answer was the latter. Winter rainfall volume is rising by about 7 per cent per degree of warming, which is close to exactly what the basic physics says it should do, and it's happening faster than most of the models had it.
That 7 per cent figure isn't a projection or an activist's estimate. It's a laboratory constant. Warm air holds more water vapour, at a known rate, and it has done since long before anyone thought to have an argument about it. What goes up must come down, and it comes down harder. A separate attribution study of the 2023-24 storm season found average rainfall on stormy days had gone up by around a fifth.
(It's human-induced climate change.)
So here's my actual pitch, and it doesn't require you to agree with me about anything else.
Our drainage, our surface sewers built and looked after by water companies, was designed to a standard. Pipe diameters, gully spacing, culvert capacity, the lot — all sized for a certain amount of rain arriving at a certain rate, based on records from a period that has now measurably ended.
Whatever you believe is causing it, the rainfall the system was built for is not the rainfall it's now getting. That's an engineering fact with a maintenance budget attached, and it's true whether the cause is fossil fuels or sunspots or the almighty's own sense of humour.
Which is precisely why I get frustrated when flooding is filed as a maintenance story and climate change as some separate abstract thing for another day. They're the same story.
Gully cleaning matters, and I'm glad we did it, but a gully is the last few feet of a system being asked to handle conditions nobody designed it for. Catchment-scale natural flood management, proper sustainable drainage standards, how much we let people concrete over, whether culverts get upsized when they're replaced: every one of those is a climate adaptation question wearing a highways hat.
And if you're sceptical about the whole business, notice what that argument actually asks of you. Not a windmill. Not a tax. Just: build the drains for the rain we're now getting rather than the rain we used to get, and make sure land owners like the Environment Agency ensure their waterways are adequately cleared, to give us the best shot.
If I'm wrong about the cause, we've spent money on better infrastructure in a county that flooded in 2007 and would like not to again. If I'm right, we'll have started twenty years too late anyway.
That seems to me a fairly poor argument to lose.
What you can do about it
There's a proper list, and it deserves a piece of its own rather than three rushed bullet points at the bottom of this one. I'll draft it over the coming weeks — what's worth doing now while it's still dry, what to do in the hour before a forecast storm, and the longer-term measures that make a house properly resilient rather than just better sandbagged. And what we can do more widely as a local authority.
If you do one thing today, report the spot that worries you. Photo, precise location, FixMyStreet or straight to me. Those reports are the evidence base that decides where the £4 million of repair money actually lands. A report in August gets investigated. A report during a storm gets triaged.
What happens next
A few things I'll be pushing on this autumn, and I'll report back on all of them.
I want to know how the £4 million repair programme is being prioritised and whether the problem spots I've been reporting for two years are on the list. And I want to see what the county's flood risk team is planning for a post-drought winter specifically, because it's a different risk profile from an ordinary one and it ought to be treated that way.
But I'd rather you took the wider point away than the shopping list.
If water comes up your road in November, three things will have put it there and none of them is a lorry that failed to turn up. Ground baked hard enough to shed rain rather than drink it. A winter half-year that now carries measurably more water than the one our drains were built for. And a strong El Niño loading the dice towards a more disturbed few months on top of both.
The gullies are clean. The drains are, for the first time in decades, on an annual cycle. That was necessary work, and it is nowhere near the whole answer, because the last few feet of a Victorian-era idea can only do so much with a twenty-first-century downpour.
Which is why I'll keep going on about culvert capacity and catchment management and front gardens under tarmac, and why I'll keep linking it to the climate, even when it isn't the popular thing to raise at a parish meeting.
Blame is easy and cheap and it fixes nothing. Capacity costs money and takes years and it's the only thing that actually works.
If your street floods, please don't wait for it to happen again before telling me. Message me now, with a photo from last time if you've got one. The best day to fix a drainage problem is a dry one in September, and we're running short of both.
Thanks, as always, for reading, and for the reports you send. The casework is the useful part of this job.
I just hope I don't have to reference this piece too many times this winter…..
Thank you so much for reading if you got this far
Thank you Nathan. An excellent explanation of the current situation and what is to come. I hope this is widely read and acted upon.
Thank you, Nathan, for a very interesting explanation of the potential risks. As a resident who lives beside the River Ock I was wondering how the news about the Super El-Nino could affect us.
It’s a beautiful river with its own character and wildlife. One thing that often frustrates me, is the amount of times I see green waste in the river.
People who tidy their garden into the river, may not realise that rubbish does not go straight into the Thames. It gets hooked up in areas where the river bottom is more shallow, places where overhanging branches catch onto the rubbish and hold it. The rubbish then builds up and more than once I’ve seen fallen branches become almost a dam. That causes flooding!
I always report build up of rubbish and potential flood risks to both Town Council ( who pass it to the relevant local authority) and the Environment Agency.
May I also add that the trees along the Ock banks may need some attention to avoid those fallen branches. I believe they are mainly Environment Agency responsibility.
Meanwhile, can I make a plea for riverside residents to NOT throw your green waste in any river?
Many thanks for reading this.