Planning...weather or not!

The extreme weather and it's horrendous consequences over recent weeks have brought out various different kinds of human nature, good, bad and down right ugly. Brave neighbours risking all to help others, those with adequate transport helping to move people out, any suitable abode made ready to house people who were all of a sudden, sodden. That's some of the good...then you get the bad and the ugly...looters, people robbing sand bags and then trying to sell them for up to £40 each...Where are the sink holes when you want one?! Then there are our leaders, nowhere to be seen for weeks, until it spread a little too close to home for comfort, suddenly waterproofs were found, wellies were bought and off they went with their good will, promises of the world and ...oh yes plenty of camera men. The one thing all of the above good,bad and ugly have proved is that we in Britain are still possibly the best in the world at reacting to situations and probably the worst in the world at being pro active. Why is it, and I know I am not the first to ask this, that our whole infrastructure and way of life stops with a few inches of snow, a heatwave, winds, rain? Why is it that a nation that reared some of the greatest minds, engineers, scientists cannot put plans into action that would at least give those poor people and areas a fighting chance when the forces of nature head our way. The answer is normally money, less money than will be needed now to put things right by the way, but nevertheless money, along with our leaders short sighted attitude of,"it will never happen again" I'm sure the the residents of Somerset would have heard that last year...and the time before that and the time before that...