Paddling in a dinghy across his potato field to inspect a tractor largely
hidden below water, Rob Keene struggled to hide his exhaustion and anxiety.
“There’s just so much that’s happened,” he said. So much he’s lost.
Keene was working in that field 10 days ago, but the ground was wet after
weeks of rain and his tractor kept getting stuck. He decided to leave it
there and collect it after the earth dried a little. But on Friday, July 20,
the heavens opened in earnest.
That day, at about 5pm, traffic passing nearby suddenly snarled up. Choking
with water, many engines simply stopped working. So for four hours, Keene
and his three sons used other farm machinery to drag cars off the road.
The Keenes supplied drinks to these passing strangers, and then food, and
finally found themselves putting up several individuals for the night.
As torrential rain poured off higher ground, causing the river to swell
further, he went out to rescue cattle from the fields nearest the water.
He’d no sooner done that than the water was up to his knees.
Then a breach in the side of a potato field started to let through a wall of
water 1ft deep. In seconds, the breach lengthened from 5ft to 250 yards. An
unstoppable torrent raced in. The flood consumed the whole field and others
beyond it.
In no time, all that was left visible of the tractor was its roof.
Altogether, 400 acres of his land were hit, destroying winter feed and
Christmas trees. His most significant crop, potatoes, is virtually wiped
out. It’s been hard to sleep at night.
The Keenes’ story was just one of many I heard as I travelled through
Tewkesbury, Cheltenham, Stroud, Gloucester and Oxford last week - after the
biggest summer flood anybody could remember.
It was like stepping into another world, described by at least one emergency
services chief as essentially a war zone. Police cars seemed to be parked on
every roundabout, blocking access to flooded roads.
Firefighters clustered around great pipes, pumping water from homes and
streets back into rivers. Officials in fluorescent yellow jackets waded
about with all the purpose and effect of King Canute.
The crisis had started upstream after the heavy rains caused two rivers, the
Avon and the Severn, which come together at Tewkesbury, to burst their
banks. But the flood did not unfold as you might expect.
In a large detached house half a mile from the rivers in Tewkesbury, Alan
Berry, a 59-year-old engineering manager, and his wife Deanna noticed water
seeping up through an air vent in his floor.
The house had never flooded before - but big new developments on the nearby
flood plain were pushing waters from the swollen river into new areas. “The
Severn and the Avon are both half a mile from where we live,” Deanna said.
“The field opposite us used to be a flood base, but the owner was given
permission to fill the land. I knew it would cause huge problems.”
Within hours the Berrys’ house was 4ft deep in water and two of their cars
were nearly submerged.
Tewkesbury was soon entirely surrounded by flood-water, and a television
reporter drolly described himself to residents as a visitor “from the
mainland”.
When I ventured in, I had the strange experience - in this inland town - of
passing Land Rovers marked Coast Guard. They drove slowly, negotiating a
passage around abandoned vehicles still steamed up inside after days under
water.
Trucks, vans and lorries shuttled about delivering water in bowsers - a word
most people had never used before but now used a great deal, as they queued
to fill buckets and bottles with the precious liquid they normally take so
much for granted.
By Wednesday, there were 900 bowsers across Gloucestershire alone - and it
wasn’t enough. People were grumbling about the water supply that, they knew,
would not be restored for at least a week after contamination of the crucial
Mythe treatment plant near Tewksbury.
Flooded residents were whispering about other people taking more than their
fair share of water, and even that some bowsers had been vandalised - young
citizens in Cheltenham reportedly contaminating water supplies by the
admixture of urine or bleach.
In urban centres, the distribution of bottled water in super-market car parks
had to be overseen by police. Andy Higgins, of Tesco in Stroud, explained:
“It got a bit punchy in Gloucester.”
That’s not altogether surprising: some 340,000 people had no water, and not a
few of these thirsty, unwashed individuals had queued for hours at bowsers
only to watch them run dry before they could fill a single bottle.
In desperation some people went in search of alternative water supplies. Greg
and Sue Dance in Stroud took me to a local spring in the hillside. The water
needs boiling before you drink it - but then so does the water from bowsers.
Remarkably, however, the Dances didn’t complain. In fact, many of the people
affected by floods and shortages refrained from complaints. “Who do I
blame?” one man asked. “God?”
If Lady Luck was watching anywhere, it was at the Walham electricity
substation on the outskirts of Gloucester. Officials from the National Grid
initially had no idea how serious the threat of flooding was because they
did not receive the Environment Agency’s flood warning.
As the waters rose, desperate efforts were made to install barriers around the
substation that supplies power to 500,000 homes. The flood came within
inches of causing a devastating power cut.
In Stroud, the volume of rain overwhelmed inadequate drainage systems -
another factor in the scale of the floods. In Slad Road, where a culvert
failed, the Lloyds pharmacy was inundated by black mud above the height of
its cabinets, as was the Coop. The waters rose so fast that staff had no way
to get out, and had to break through a fence at the back.
Across the road, floods consumed garages belonging to individuals such as
Lionel Walround, a retired museum curator.
Archived documents and photographs from the 1800s were destroyed, he says, and
his pristine Austin Metro was perfectly coated, inside and out, with an
emulsion of muck and oil. Insurers have offered just £350 in compensation –
but the wider cost is huge.
Since the floods - and those in Yorkshire last month - more than 50,000 people
and businesses have already lodged insurance claims for flood damage, and
the cost is estimated at £3 billion and rising fast.
Walround, 79, looked remarkably calm, but when I pointed that out he made a
grinding motion with his hands.
“I feel like somebody has done this to my insides,” he said, though he offered
that others had suffered worse.
They had. Samantha Jones, a pregnant mother, fell over in sewage that had
backed up into her home; and she was carrying her toddler at the time.
“They’ve told us we’ve got to disinfect the whole place and ourselves,” she
said. “The water’s horrible.”
By the end of the week the Health Protection Agency was warning that
floodwaters mixed with sewage might contain dangerous bacteria such as
cholera and E.coli. Another risk was Weil’s disease, an illness transmitted
by rats - which were being flushed out of their nests by the floods - that
can cause kidney and liver failure.
On the plus side, many observed that the floods had prompted an outpouring of
community spirit. Adrian Rosser, whose garden in Botley filled with badgers
flooded out of their sett, had gone to fetch sandbags and had been
confronted by an intimidating group of hoodies - only to be asked by one
cheerful yoof if they could help in any way.
The “Blitz spirit” cliché, though, had its limits. Pensioners and disabled
people, gathered together in evacuation centres, milled about looking
confused, not cheerful.
And Athene Reiss, from one of the two worst-affected streets in Oxford, told
me that Duke Street already had a good community spirit, thank you very
much, and didn’t need flooding to bring out the best in people.
Like many others, Reiss urgently wanted to show how housing developments on
flood plains had caused homes such as hers, in older streets, to end up
inundated.
She was waiting on a corner for the rumoured arrival of Hilary Benn, the
environment secretary, who was on walkabout nearby. I wondered what she
wanted to show him - perhaps the car parks of super-stores nearby sprawling
over what had once been meadows.
That wasn’t what Reiss had in mind. Wading through Duke Street she gestured
towards a new development of executive homes, none of them flooded.
“Yvette Cooper, the housing minister, might look at these and say, ‘Great!
They didn’t flood, so you can build on flood plains!’ But that’s because
they raised the level of the ground under the new houses - which meant that
our road flooded instead.
“We’re not angry with the people who live there,” Reiss emphasised. “We’re
angry with the developer, and we’re angry with the council for letting them
build it.”
She never had the chance to show Benn what troubled her. After a brief peek
round nearby Osney, the minister was whisked away elsewhere. As the waters
persisted and more rain was forecast for this weekend, the dam of stoicism
was in danger of breaking, unleashing a deluge of disillusion.
In Gloucester, John Russell, a lorry driver, and his wife Roz were among those
worst affected. Their home in a Victorian terrace built near the banks of
the river had flooded in 2000.
“We met Tony Blair in 2000,” Roz recalled, “and he personally promised us that
there was money there for flood defences.”
It took a while for anything to be done, but eventually new defences were
built. What protection did the authorities deliver? A 2ft-high brick wall
was built across gardens running down to the river.
Last week the flood waters “oozed through the bricks like tissue paper”, said
Russell, and then overwhelmed the wall.
“It took six years before anything happened and then little more than six
months after they finished building the flood defences they proved useless.
I was absolutely devastated.”
Additional reporting: Brendan Montague
Unlearnt lessons
Britain has a long history of floods - and of failing to act on the “lessons
learnt”.
After severe flooding in 2000 the government declared the devastation “a wake
up call” and John Prescott, then the environment secretary, told parliament:
“We must take practical action now.”
Since then there have been 25 reports from parliamentary committees and
official bodies on how to reduce risks. Little has been done.
The government decided there should be clearer organisation of flood defence.
But it failed to create a body with central control, instead leaving flood
protection measures to local committees while drainage was overseen by a
hotchpotch of local authorities, agricultural drainage boards, the Highways
Agency and water utilities.
Two years ago the government finally gave the Environment Agency (EA) national
control of flood defence planning and expenditure. Only now does the EA
believe it is getting sufficient powers and funding to perform the role
properly.
Management of drainage schemes remains scattered among numerous bodies. A
government review, started before the most recent floods, is expected to
recommend that the EA takes over this function too.
However, some experts believe the EA’s remit - which covers “protecting
and improving the environment” - is now too broad to be effective.
Dieter Helm, professor of energy policy at Oxford University, said last
week: “Flood defence is now sufficiently serious to require its own Flood
Defence and Management Agency.”
The government declared after the 2000 flooding that there should be a
significant increase in funding for flood defence. Though funding did rise,
more recently it was cut again. Last year a cut in the EA budget of £14m
prompted cuts in flood defence plans.
A recently leaked memo from the government’s spending review shows that before
Gordon Brown became PM he was planning to cut millions from the EA’s flood
defence budget later this year.
