A MAJOR recovery operation was under way last night in dozens of rural communities that fell victim to a freak summer storm. It sent flash floods surging through homes and businesses, leaving a trail of muddy devastation.
Across a 20-mile stretch of North Yorkshire, between the market towns of Thirsk and Helmsley, Sunday afternoon’s deluge turned small streams and meandering rivers into raging torrents.
Hundreds of sheep and cattle were drowned and RAF helicopters had to launch rescue operations to save stranded householders, some clinging to trees and car roofs. No one was killed, but some villages remained cut off, without power, water or transport. The damage will cost tens of millions of pounds to repair, insurers estimated.
The Environment Agency said that it was impossible to predict the ferocity of the storm. Three inches of rain — North Yorkshire’s average for the whole of June — fell over the Cleveland Hills in three hours.
The waters were so powerful that they gouged giant craters in roads, created landslides, swept cars and caravans downstream and demolished buildings that had stood for more than 200 years. A woman was airlifted to hospital with a suspected heart attack, three pets drowned in their kennels, hundreds of bikers had to seek refuge in a stately home and an elderly woman avoided the flood that engulfed her house by escaping upstairs on her chairlift.
In Hawnby, the Earl and Countess of Mexborough at Arden Hall were lending moral support to villagers left in a state of shock when a wall of water swept away two bridges, leaving them stranded. An 18th-century stone cottage on their estate collapsed and a rescue operation was mounted to save 40 cats and dogs from boarding kennels. All but three pets were rescued.
Dozens of gravestones at All Saints, Hawnby’s Norman church, were flattened and trees uprooted. A dead calf, caked in mud, was slumped across one of the headstones.
Lady Mexborough said: “It feels like everything’s been destroyed. We can’t get out, the telephones and the electricity are cut off, deep craters have appeared in the road and all we can do is try to keep spirits up.
“This is a very small community but, when the chips are down, everybody pulls together. We want to share with them just how awful it all is. I think we’ll all have a good cry together.”
A few miles away James Herriot’s daughter was doing her best to keep morale high in the 400-year-old village of Thirlby.
Rosie Page, a retired GP whose father, the vet turned novelist, spent his retirement in Thirlby, gave refuge to three elderly people whose homes were among a dozen that had become a waterway.
“Thunder had rumbled for ages and when the rain came it was like a tropical downpour,” she said. “It lasted for about half an hour and when it was over I thought we might still have time for a barbecue. We had no idea what was about to happen.”
Nobody was prepared for Willow Beck, which usually winds gently through Thirlby, to rise suddenly 13ft (4m), burst its banks and send a torrent to submerge homes under 6ft of water.
Dr Page’s neighbour, Mary Harrison, was left alone in her 19th-century home while her husband and daughter went to help a friend. Before they could return, the waters had created a channel that ran through the yard, bringing with it giant tree trunks and assorted debris that included a vertical Ford Focus and a large dead fish.
When the water invaded her home, Mrs Harrison went in search of her family, only to find that the bridge 20 yards from her home had been washed away, leaving her husband and daughter stranded on the other side.
“I panicked a bit then, but in the end they managed to get across, by which time we couldn’t get back into the house. There was no time to get anything.
“My phone, my purse, everything, was just left. All we could do was stand on the hillside and watch as everything we owned was washed away or ruined. What are we supposed to do now?” she said.
Anna Bramall, 32, came back from Cornwall to find that her renovated racing stables in the village of Boltby, two miles from Thirlby, appeared to have been struck by an earthquake.
A trainer’s yard was a morass of mud and silt and a Mercedes car had been swept hundreds of yards to find a precarious perch against a tree. A newly forged dam in the garden featured, among a small forest of tree branches, fences, tiles and boulders, a new soft-top Audi car, a wheelie bin and a mud-encrusted bottle of champagne.
Two dogs, a spaniel and terrier, which had been floating, terrified, in a locked stable were rescued by neighbours. Miss Bramall was relieved that all her horses, which had been in a field, were safe.
Paul Kelsey, 45, of Harrogate, saw seven of his stranded friends plucked to safety by rescue crews after a motorcycling event at Duncombe Park. “Two airlifts saved seven of my mates. One was stuck up a tree and the others were struggling.
“I don’t know whether they saved their lives or not but they’d have been struggling without their help,” Mr Kelsey said. The fire brigade came to the rescue of Ruth Mitchell, 89, a retired schoolteacher whose cottage in Sutton-under-Whitestonecliffe was swamped by the floodwater.
Ms Mitchell said that she used her electric chairlift to escape from the rising waters, then flashed a torch out of her window to attract the attention of rescuers. Her cat, Whiskers, was also saved when a fireman grabbed it as it floated past the house on a cushion.
