Sandbags? Really?!
The Ministry of Defence is to deploy equipment and manpower to help those in affected areas by delivering food, transporting people and distributing sandbags.
An MoD spokeswoman said : "We have tonight deployed military planners to help Somerset county council determine what support they might need."
She added they would be in the county overnight to assess what was required in time for first light on Thursday.
Speaking to the BBC, the environment secretary, Owen Paterson, said: "As we speak the Ministry of Defence and the Department for Local Government are discussing how we could deploy specialist vehicles which could help some of those villages which have been cut off, to help people travel backwards and forwards, to get fuel and food in and out, and to help with transport from dry land.
"And secondly, there will also be help with sand bags, which could help prevent further flooding."
Paterson said the county council asked for assistance "for the first time today" and echoed the prime minister's assertions that dredging would take place as soon as it is safe. David Cameron has admitted the ongoing flooding in Somerset is unacceptable, and has overruled the Environment Agency to order dredging of nearby rivers as soon as possible.
The Liberal Democrat MP David Heath had protested that an area the size of Bristol had been flooded for a month.
Tackled on the issue during prime minister's questions, Cameron said he was urgently exploring what else could be done.
"We now need to move more rapidly to the issues like dredging, which I think will help to make a long-term difference," he said. "It is not currently safe to dredge in the Levels. But I can confirm that dredging will start as soon as it is practical, as soon as the waters have started to come down.
"The Environment Agency is pumping as much water as is possible given the capacity of the rivers around the Levels," he said, "but I have ordered that further high-volume pumps from the DCLG's [Department for Communities and Local Government's] national reserve will be made available to increase the volume of the pumping operation as soon as there is capacity in the rivers to support that.
"We are urgently exploring what further help the government can give local residents to move around and I rule nothing out in the days ahead to get this problem sorted."
It is not yet clear where the £4m necessary to restart the dredging is coming from, as the government has not offered any extra funds to Somerset. A spokeswoman for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said the funding had not yet been worked out.
"Dredging will be carried out in the Somerset Levels as soon as it is safe and practical to do so," she said. "We are in discussions with the Environment Agency to start planning the details. We are also working with the local community to produce an action plan looking at all the different options for managing flood risk there over the next 20 years."
Some residents in the area are furious that the Environment Agency stopped dredging the rivers years ago and have accused it of failing to keep up proper river maintenance. It is thought that about 40% of the capacity of the rivers Tone and Parrett could be clogged up with silt.
Michael Eavis, the founder of Glastonbury Festival, launched a high-profile campaign in favour of dredging last year. However, the evidence that it will help is far from clear.
Dr Hannah Cloke, a flooding expert from the University of Reading, said the prime minister's assertion that dredging could provide a long-term solution to flooding is "just not backed up by the evidence".
"It's understandable that those affected by flooding are calling for more action, [but] dredging would not have prevented the flooding in Somerset," she said"There needs to be a much wider programme of flood prevention to protect people's homes in the future, and other measures, such as capturing water upstream in lower-risk areas, are likely to be more effective than dredging."
The Environment Agency's chairman, Lord Smith, has said dredging makes only a small difference and is not a "comprehensive answer". His view was contradicted by Jean Venables, chief executive of the Association of Drainage Authorities, who said the current levels of flooding could have been averted.
"It's a disaster area down there and it could have been avoided if we had kept up with maintenance on the rivers," she told BBC Radio 4's Today programme on Tuesday. "We have got a 20-year backlog of inactivity down there and it's actually very, very urgent that those rivers are dredged."
On Monday the environment secretary, Owen Paterson, announced a six-week review of the floods and indicated that he expected dredging would be part of the plan.
John Osman, the leader of Somerset county council, said he was delighted that Cameron had brought forward his announcement that dredging would resume. "This is just what we wanted to hear from the prime minister," he said.
"We have lobbied hard to get national attention, we are in a major incident due to the extent and length of time that much of the county is flooded. Now we have the PM behind us, people can start to believe that real action, dredging the rivers, sorting the drainage systems, protecting our communities will really happen."
Comment: Do the locals really believe this will suddenly happen after "20 years of inactivity"? There are wars to be won and booty to be plundered in far-off lands; why would the British government care about protecting its own people from flooding? This is just a stop-gap measure to win short-term political support - the funds for long-term engineering solutions are needed for the wars and 'protecting people' against the terrorists created by the government.