Barrier will protect London to ‘end of century’

The Thames Barrier will continue to protect London from North Sea storm surges for the rest of this century, even if global warming accelerates and sea level rises faster than expected, the Environment Agency says in a new study.

Later this spring ITV viewers will be presented with a dystopian vision of the capital submerged by a catastrophic storm surge at a cost of thousands of lives and billions of pounds in damage when the channel shows Flood, its £15m ($30m) disaster film.

However, the agency, which runs the 25-year-old barrier, says such a scenario is impossible, both now and for the foreseeable future.

Sarah Lavery, head of the agency’s Thames Estuary 2100 project, said a recent flood prediction exercise “took the most intense wind and pressure fields ever recorded in the North Sea, combined with the highest astronomical tide on the record, and could not produce a scenario that defeated the current defences”.

The TE2100 project is due to report to the government in 2009 on measures that will be needed over the next 90 years to manage flood risk in the Thames Estuary.

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