REGARDING the report about the families flooded out in Westhoughton.

I would like to relay a quick story I remembered when reading about the above. Last year, my dad, a retired Chartered Engineer, came to visit from Australia.

During a walk down Dobbs Brow and Pennington brook footpath, he looked at all the building going on and said: "You know, this is going to cause problems." And continued to explain why. He said, all the land that would normally soak up rain is going to go under roofs, road tarmacadam, pavements and so on. That means the rain won't soak away as it should. What will happen instead is, it will get collected in storm drains, along with all the moss and twigs off the roofs and of course the road rubbish washed off the roads.

That mess is then discharged into the water courses around here (Pennington and Cunningham brooks), That extra water further erodes the banks of the streams and, because there is more water, and it runs faster, more soil and bigger stones get carried along with it. This has got to go somewhere, and it will stop as soon as the water either drops in speed, the level goes down or the rubbish gets stuck. There it will cause a dam. So someone down stream in future is going to find themselves knee deep in water.

Well now, low and behold, an O-level (that's GCSE nowadays) hydrology lesson proves to be correct.

So, before any more houses are built around Westhoughton, or anywhere else for that matter, would the borough Engineers and building developers like to take the above advice into consideration before giving the OK or going ahead with more housing "development"? Especially near up stream water courses.

Ainslie Casson

The Poplars, Church Walks

Westhoughton, Bolton