RIVERBED silting is a natural process. Eventually without intervention, the river bursts its banks and finds a new route across lower ground.

In New Orleans the regular intervention of man ensured ships kept to historic routes and sailed at a higher level than the city. It took a hurricane to show the foolishness of not dredging to keep the water level lower than the city.

Martin Watkins, of the Environment Agency, says dredging is not a solution. He properly cites the needs of fish and aquatic wildlife dependent on the riverbed for their existence. He also says dredging would be quite expensive. Flooding is expensive too. Building barriers is expensive and a temporary measure if river beds are allowed to continue silting up.

Perhaps, if strategically sited static installations were designed to suck up silt from deep sinkholes in the river bed, the power of water to keep re-filling those deep sections would ensure the general level of the river bed might gradually be reduced to a level similar to that of centuries ago.

The riverbed wildlife would be mostly undisturbed if, just occasionally, a newly filled sinkhole was pumped out and clean water drained back from settlement ponds, later dug out of rich silts which could be sold to defray costs.

Has a dredging solution ever been tested by the EA? Has the power of flowing water ever been harnessed to help the economics of dredging, as suggested above? Surely it must be wrong of the EA to make such dogmatic statements as those made by Martin Watkins (Hereford Times, July 26). Man is an ingenious creature. Surely man can solve the problem of three days of heavy rain more efficiently than just recently and with less human upset and financial cost.

JOHN GAUNT, Wigmore.