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Tide begins to turn for U.K.’s flooded villages

Martin Wainwright

London: It was the great escape on Sunday for Britain’s flood-weary areas as a front of heavy rainfall disintegrated into fierce but brief showers which left river levels falling and inundated villages free to bale out. Heavy-duty pumps finally turned the tide in the battle to drain lakes of water in Bentley and Toll Bar at Doncaster in South Yorkshire, where troops and lifeboat crews joined firefighters from 15 services, including teams from Somerset and south Wales.

The body of an elderly woman was recovered on Sunday from the swollen river Severn at Ironbridge, Shropshire, raising the provisional death toll of the floods to seven. Police, meanwhile, cracked down on isolated cases of theft from evacuated homes, and a brief attempt by teenagers to sell stolen sandbags to anxious householders. Doncaster council served its 10,000th meal at midday to one of the 360 persons still camping in emergency centres as the water drained slowly away.

The new national flood support centre in Worcester was kept busy but avoided the expected major emergency as equipment already in place brought water levels down. Toll Bar alone had 14 pumps carrying more than 100,000 litres a minute away from the high street, where filthy tidemarks smeared houses and shops up to the top of front doors.

Flood defence experts are to look at the failure of a long-established sluice system above the villages, which usually sees relief gates open under pressure when the Ea beck swells, allowing floodwater to escape into the river Don. Last week, the Don was already so full of run-off from torrential rain upstream in Sheffield that the gates were held shut and the Ea beck burst its banks and sent torrents of filthy water and debris into Toll Bar and Bentley.

A spokeswoman at South Yorkshire’s Gold Command flood centre said: “The problem has been the sheer volume of water and with more rain forecast, it’s still a battle. But today has certainly been more manageable than earlier in the week.” The Environment Agency still had four severe flood warnings in place on Sunday night along the Don valley, with a further 21 standard warnings, 13 in the north-east including Yorkshire, and eight in East Anglia. Two inshore lifeboats were moved to the Don sector by the Royal National Lifeboat Institution. Forecasters said that the disintegration of what had initially looked like a solid rainfall front had spared the waterlogged centres of the flooding crisis from a second inundation.

Liz Annetts, of MeteoGroup, said: “No deluge is now expected. Some of the showers could be heavy with a risk of thunder but they are going to be quite quick-moving and no one place is going to get a huge amount of rain.”

Two men were arrested on the Bransholme estate in Hull after allegedly impersonating council officers as a cover for removing property from evacuated homes. Residents were warned to beware of other conmen or cowboy builders offering to make instant repairs. Mary Dhonau, coordinator of the National Flood Forum, said that crime added to the misery of an estimated one in four of flood victims who had no insurance. She said: “That’s an awful lot of people who can’t afford new accommodation and they don’t have the money to replace all their items.

It’s heartbreaking. It’s bad enough being flooded but to not have insurance is just the pits.” The Meteorological Office confirmed that this June has been the wettest in England since 1914.

Forecaster Nick Ricketts said: “Several places have had in excess of 150 mm of rain, with some having around three times more rain than average. The usually sheltered east of the country has been hit for once because winds have come from the north and east, instead of the usual westerlies at this time of the year.”

Further heavy but intermittent rain is forecast until Wednesday, with unsettled conditions continuing into the first two weeks of the month. Mr Ricketts said: “I don’t know where our summer has gone, considering that there have been heat waves in Italy, Greece, Turkey and Romania and temperatures in the south of France have been into the 30s.” The bill for damage, meanwhile, continues to rise above £1 billion, with the RAF’s Waddington international air show cancelled on public safety grounds.

The National Farmers’ Union said that the strawberry crop had been saved from devastation by polytunnels which deflected downpours in Herefordshire and Worcestershire. The NFU chief horticultural adviser, Philip Hudson, said: “Rains like this would have destroyed around 40 per cent of the crop before the tunnels provided cover.” —

Guardian Newspapers Limited 2007

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