Flooding in UK

[BagOfCrisps 24]

Some pretty severe flooding here at the moment and in lots of places too.

Doesn't look like getting much better either.

Yikes.

[@tokyo 14]

Looks really widespread too.

You or yours affected Bag?

[DumbStick 13]

Flooding is scary indeed.

 

Hope it eases off.

[BagOfCrisps 24]

All ok with my family thanks, but I know some people who are looking very anxiously at the water levels nearby.

 

[pie-eater 207]

North West seems to have got off this lot, albeit forever never ending bad weather.

[pie-eater 207]

I take that back, some pretty severe wind warnings for the North West.

[pie-eater 207]

To get to the house of Steve Wilton's dreams, you have first to make it as far as the small Somerset village of Burrowbridge, along half-submerged lanes winding uneasily between seas of muddy brown water as wide as the sky and whipped, today, into stiff white horses by a westerly gale.

You park in the school car park, pull on your waders, and cross the bridge over the River Parrett by the King Alfred pub, its backroom piled high with boxes of biscuits, Pot Noodles, jars of instant coffee and tins of soup and beans, marked Somerset Levels Relief Donations.

You pause on the bridge, and notice the river is so high that the arch has vanished. Men and women in hi-vis jackets and blue chest-high waders fill wheelbarrows with woodchips and spread them on the sodden riverbank. There is a digger manned by firefighters from Lowestoft, a team of Sikh volunteers from Slough and a mobile police station.

Over the bridge, the A361 to Taunton is, a policeman says, six or eight feet under. You turn along the bank, the wind knocking you sideways, and clamber over half-a-dozen steel pipes pumping tens of thousands of gallons of floodwater into the already swollen river. Down a short stretch of miraculously still-dry road is where Steve lives.

It's a lovely building, a handsome brick farmhouse dating from 1830, standing on 18 acres and with a view. What a view. Steve, his wife Kay, their daughter Felicity, her husband Ross, and their daughters Ellen, three, and Mallory, 16 months, moved in barely six weeks ago, just before Christmas.

It is now a foot under water.

"It really was the house of our dreams," says Steve, 56, a self-employed painter and decorator, standing knee-deep in the kitchen. "We took nearly a year to find it. Needs a bit of work, sure, but nothing major. I was going to take my time doing it up, enjoy it. This was going to be it – when I leave here, I thought, it'll be in a box."

The families were living in Kent when Ross was offered a move to Somerset with his work. "We thought: 'Well, we all get on so well,'" says Steve. "Ross and Felicity couldn't get much of a mortgage; it's hard for young people these days. And our house was already paid off. So we thought, sell that, pool our resources, move in together."

They checked, of course. The solicitor did a search, they went through the parish records and local histories, they got a sworn statement from the vendors: in the 150-plus years since it was built, the farm had never flooded. So when the water started pushing up from the bottom field a couple of weeks ago, they weren't too worried, says Steve.

"We knew the bottom field often gets a bit wet," he says. "This is the Levels, after all. Well, it's six feet under now. There's a five-bar gate down there – you can't even see it. But even three days ago it was looking all right. The chickens were out there on the lawn last weekend."

When it came, it came fast. Kay, Felicity and the girls left last week, moving in with people in the next village who they barely knew. The animals – two dogs, three cats, 10 chickens, two ducks, six tortoises, three rabbits – left by boat on Monday. Steve and Ross stuck it out one more night, working nearly round the clock to empty kitchen cupboards, raise tables on bricks, move fridges and freezers and sofas.

"We never thought it would come to this," says Steve. "If you'd said to me only a week ago ..." He gestures, despairingly, at the filthy water lapping at the lintels in the front room. He finds it hard to speak; apologises.

"Sorry," he says. "It's your life, you know? But the people here ... They've just been amazing. They're working so hard, all of them. So unbelievably hard; filling sandbags, pumping, shoring up, helping each other. And taking people in. Ross and I are staying with friends up the road. I say friends; we didn't know their names until two days ago."

When the water finally rose up to the house, they worked fast. "We sandbagged the doors, but it came up through the floor," says Steve. "And through the walls. There's no way you can stop it. Nothing you can do. We did all we could, honestly. There was nothing more we could do, Ross and I. We worked ourselves into the ground."

Slowly, we walk through the groundfloor, most of it knee-deep in water you wouldn't want to touch: "Everyone's on cesspool drainage round here," says Steve. "This is sewage, basically." The bottom half of the kitchen cupboards are all empty; Steve wonders whether he now needs to start thinking about emptying the top shelf too. The cooker is half-submerged.

In the two front rooms, up a step from the kitchen level and so only a few inches deep in water, chairs are piled on sofas, tables on sideboards.

[Metabo Oyaji 71]

Sounds like a real mess.

[muikabochi 208]

Sure does.

 

Seems to have been terrible weather in UK for..... a long time now. (Jokes about UK weather aside).

[Tubby Beaver 209]

The Government cut 110 million quid from the flood defence budget in it's austerity drive and it's estimated to cost about 1 billion quid to fix all the damage.......nice save, Dave

[Alexander L 80]

is Mold OK?

[big-will 7]

Flood-hit areas earmarked for more homes

 

Councils have issued plans to build hundreds of new homes in some of the areas worst affected by the country's flooding crisis.

 

Councils in some of the areas worst affected by Britain’s flooding crisis have published plans to build hundreds of homes on land that is currently under water.

 

Dozens of potential sites have been earmarked for development in areas hit by the floods, such as the village of Wraysbury in Berkshire and Chertsey in Surrey.

 

Potential housing development is also scheduled for Walton-on-Thames and Molesey — two riverside sites in Surrey that are subject to “severe” flood warnings involving danger to life.

 

On the Somerset Levels, Taunton Deane borough council has designated land in the village of North Curry for new homes, even though one of the proposed sites, next to Curry Moor, is used as an overspill area for flood water and has been underwater for weeks.

 

The neighbouring council, Sedgemoor, has identified sites in at least four villages for housing, even though all are within the highest-risk flood zone.

 

 

The swans seem to like it.

[BagOfCrisps 24]

They seem to love the photo opp, the swans.

[big-will 7]

Britain has offered to help fund an international financial rescue package for Ukraine amid mounting fears that Russia may intervene following the country's revolution.

George Osborne, the Chancellor, said that Britain and other countries will be ready “with a chequebook” to help “rebuild” Ukraine following the bloody violence that has seen 88 killed and hundreds more injured.

 

Bet the flooded UK citizens will be happy to hear that.

 

[Tubby Beaver 209]

And the single parent families, unemployed, disabled and all the other regular joes that the Tories have stamped into poverty

[grungy-gonads 54]

Did all those groups benefit fantastically from all those years of Blair's Labour?

 

[Tubby Beaver 209]

Much better than now, yeah. They were the ones the cuts had most effect on