Robert J. Park — Environment · Carbon · Public Affairs

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Largs flooded this morning. Nobody is to blame. That is the problem.

· Public realm · Flooding · Climate adaptation · Energy · Northern Ireland · Policy

A weather station instrument against a stormy sky
Storm Boelo was the second named storm of the season. A third, Chloe, is forecast within days.

Storm Boelo put Largs Main Street under water on Sunday morning. The seawall was rebuilt two years ago. No one cut a budget, no one failed a duty, and the town flooded anyway. Across the UK and Europe, that is now the normal pattern. The answer is a legal duty to keep the public realm fit for the climate we have, not a hunt for someone to prosecute afterwards.

The storm

Storm Boelo, the second named storm of the season, came through the west of Scotland overnight on 24–25 October with gusts of 84mph at Machrihanish. By breakfast, floodwater was running down Largs Main Street past the shops. One business said it was the highest level they had ever seen. Saltcoats, Skelmorlie, Dumbarton, Rothesay and Millport flooded too. SEPA had 35 flood warnings out. Twenty-seven of CalMac’s thirty routes were cancelled. In Ireland more than 40,000 homes lost power, mostly to fallen trees in Donegal; in Northern Ireland about 7,000 were still off at lunchtime. A third storm, Chloe, is forecast for Tuesday.

Here is the awkward fact. North Ayrshire Council finished a £4m rebuild of the deteriorated 1970s seawall at the north end of Largs Bay in 2024. The £48m Millport scheme, 80% funded by the Scottish Government, is complete. Largs is not a story of a council that let its defences rot. It is a story of defences built to a standard the sea no longer respects.

What I went looking for

I spent Sunday pulling together every case I could find, across the UK and the EU, where cuts or neglect of ordinary public works, such as sea walls, river maintenance, drains and gullies, roadside trees, scrub clearance and fire cover, have been linked to a climate disaster. Floods, fires, power cuts, heat and cold deaths. About sixty cases, each graded by how firmly an official body ties the cut to the harm.

Three things stand out.

1. The under-investment is real and it is admitted

This is not a campaigner’s claim. It is on the record from the bodies responsible.

  • In England, the Environment Agency needed £235m for maintenance in 2022-23 and got £201m. By 2023 the National Audit Office found the target of better protecting 336,000 properties by 2027 had been cut to 200,000. Ministers have since said they inherited flood assets “in their worst condition on record”, with about 3,000 of 38,000 high-consequence assets below standard, and redirected £108m to repairs.
  • In Scotland, national flood capital has been fixed at £42m a year in cash since 2016. Of 40 schemes planned in 2015, 19 are complete and 8 have been abandoned with £30m sunk; costs have more than doubled to over £1bn. Audit Scotland called the allocation process “not fit for purpose” in August 2025 and warned that almost 400,000 properties could be at risk by 2080.
  • In Northern Ireland, the Department for Infrastructure ran a “limited service” on gullies, verges and drainage through 2023-25 after a budget £112m short of need. Officials told the Assembly: “We are pausing work that will probably end up being more expensive in the longer term.” The NI Audit Office found in June 2026 that only one flood scheme in five finishes on time.
  • In Wales, Natural Resources Wales cut 233 posts in the month Storm Bert flooded 700 properties.

2. Almost nobody can prove a cut killed anyone

This is the part the headlines miss. Official findings that a specific cut caused specific deaths are rare, and prosecutions after disasters usually collapse on causation.

  • The Ahr valley floods killed 136 people in Rhineland-Palatinate in 2021. The state inquiry found warning and command failures. The prosecutor dropped the case because it could not be shown “with near certainty” that different actions would have saved particular lives.
  • Valencia’s 2024 floods killed about 230. The investigating judge called the 20:11 phone alert “late and wrong”. The regional high court has refused, so far, to charge the former president.
  • Portugal’s independent commission found roadside fuel-break rules were not complied with before the 2017 Pedrógão Grande fire that killed 64. All eleven defendants were acquitted, and the acquittals were upheld in 2025.
  • A French government inspection of the 2023-24 Pas-de-Calais floods examined the claim that neglected drainage ditches were to blame, and rejected it: the works were overwhelmed “even when perfectly maintained”.
  • In Northern Ireland, a senior DfI official told MLAs after the 2023 Newry and Downpatrick floods: “I could not make the leap to say that not having the full budget resulted in a higher level of flooding.”

Spain is the sharpest example. Since 2013 every Spanish municipality in a high-risk zone has been legally required to hold a wildfire plan and to make landowners clear scrub where homes meet forest. In Castilla y León, none of the 701 highest-risk municipalities had a plan when 150,000 hectares burned in 2025. In Almería, 99 of 101 at-risk municipalities have none, including Los Gallardos and Bédar, where a fire in July killed at least 13 people, seven of them British. Spain’s Ombudsman says councils send letters instead of clearing land. The duty exists. The money, the staff and the political will to enforce it on neighbours do not. And still no court has found that this caused a death.

3. What does work is boring, and provable

The strongest evidence in the whole review runs the other way. Interventions save lives, measurably.

  • England’s heat-health alerts and the Adverse Weather and Health Plan: 1,504 heat deaths in the record summer of 2025 against 3,039 predicted, according to UKHSA.
  • France’s national heatwave plan after 15,000 died in 2003: about 2,000 deaths in the 2006 heatwave against 6,400 expected.
  • Europe-wide, Nature Medicine estimates 2023’s 47,000 heat deaths would have been 80% higher without adaptation already in place.
  • Czechia’s reservoirs and warnings, built after the 1997 floods, cut 2024’s Storm Boris peaks by up to 80%: seven dead against sixty in 1997.
  • The Netherlands puts about €1.9bn a year into its Delta Fund, by statute, to 2039.

The view from Larne Lough

I write this from Larne, where the point lands close to home. Northern Ireland’s conventional generation sits on two sea loughs within fifteen miles of each other. Kilroot, on the shore of Belfast Lough at Carrickfergus, is named on the NI flood hazard maps as an area of significant flood risk; its coal units closed in 2023 and 824MW of gas plant now runs there, with a further 500MW planned. Ballylumford, at the mouth of Larne Lough on Islandmagee, hosts the gas station, the 275kV substation, the Moyle interconnector to Scotland and, under the lough itself, the consented gas-storage caverns.

On 7 December 2024 Storm Darragh did “significant and unforeseen damage” at Ballylumford. Three of Northern Ireland’s six large generators went into extended outage. SONI ran the grid “at an increased level of risk” for the rest of the winter and full output did not return until July 2025. When Coolkeeragh’s outage then overran, the Executive had to raise Kilroot’s permitted running hours because, in the Economy Minister’s words, running without it was “an unacceptable risk”. Belfast’s sea level is projected to rise by up to 58cm by the 2080s. Northern Ireland has no coastal protection law and no department with clear responsibility for coastal erosion. Those are facts about the public realm around our energy, and they are within Stormont’s gift to fix.

What this means for the Public Realm Bill

I have been drafting a Public Realm (Framework and Entitlement) Bill. The evidence points to a clear design choice. Do not build it around blame, because blame does not survive contact with a courtroom. Build it around a duty to provide.

  1. A statutory duty to maintain designated public-realm assets, including sea walls, river defences, drains and gullies, roadside trees and firebreaks, to a published standard, with annual condition reporting. England’s new flood funding rules already treat refurbishment on a par with new build; make that permanent and UK-wide.
  2. Public asset registers, so that residents of Largs or Newry can see the condition of what protects them before the storm, not after.
  3. Delivery timetables and spending transparency for funded schemes. Valencia, Thessaly, Ischia and Midleton all had works on paper for years.
  4. Emergency planning duties for small catchments, reservoirs and cooling and warm spaces, where the Limburg and Wallonia inquiries found the real gaps.
  5. Resources tied to the duty. Spain’s lesson, in Greenpeace’s words: “no se puede tener responsabilidad sin recursos”. A duty without money is a letter nobody answers.
  6. For Northern Ireland, a statutory coastal protection duty with a named lead department, published resilience assessments for critical-infrastructure sites on the flood maps, and a joint review of generator resilience standards and the severe-weather compensation exemption after Darragh, Éowyn and Boelo.

Most of this is devolved. Flooding, drainage, roads, fire and public health sit with Holyrood, the Senedd and Stormont. The Bill will need legislative consent or parallel measures, and for Northern Ireland I am preparing a concept paper for the parties ahead of the May 2027 Assembly and council elections. Northern Ireland has its own hooks: the DfI limited-service regime, the June 2026 Audit Office report, 296 wildfires in the Mournes in a single week of April 2025, and the fact that 285,000 NIE customers got no compensation after Storm Éowyn because of a severe-weather exemption the regulator proposes to keep.

Largs will dry out. The question is whether, by the time the next Boelo arrives, the law will require anyone to have made it ready.

Robert J. Park is an environment, carbon and public affairs consultant based in Larne, Northern Ireland, and the author of the Public Realm Bill. Download the briefing, *Built for Yesterday’s Weather* (PDF, 6 pages). The full evidence review, with sources and causal-link grading for every case, is available on request at robert@robertjpark.co.uk.

Sources (selection): NAO, Resilience to flooding, 2023 · Audit Scotland, Flooding in communities, Aug 2025 · NI Audit Office, Flood Risk Management, Jun 2026 · DfI 2023-24 budget · DfE written statement on electricity supply, 1 Oct 2025 · Irish News on Ballylumford storm damage, Jan 2025 · CCRA3 Summary for Northern Ireland · UKHSA heat mortality 2025 · Ofgem Storm Arwen review · ESB Storm Éowyn review · La Voz de Almería on Almería’s missing fire plans · STV on Storm Boelo · North Ayrshire Council, Largs seawall