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Deadly Storm Boris has flooded large areas of central Europe and the UK, destroying homes and displacing thousands of people.

With the flooding of sub-stations, the scouring of the foundations of pylons and river embankment failures, the rainstorm has also caused power outages many miles away. This will create yet more disruption as sewage pumping stations stall, train and tram services halt and vehicle charging points fail.

The UK saw this ripple of infrastructure failure in the 2007 summer floods. The compound failures caused by flooding in Gloucestershire alone, a county in south-west England, left 350,000 people without mains water for over two weeks and 42,000 people without power.

Commuters were stranded on the railway network and the M5 motorway. The floods also made thousands of people homeless. Similar floods struck the UK again in 2013 and 2020.

All systems fail occasionally. But infrastructure is increasingly vulnerable to disruptions caused by extreme weather, which is being made more severe and frequent as a result of climate change. The UK's national risk register lists nine impacts of climate change (including storms, heat waves and wildfires) that could seriously damage infrastructure that is increasingly complex and interconnected. A single failure can create a cascade of them.

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