Viewing 35 posts - 1 through 35 (of 35 total)
  • The big floods – 10 years ago.
  • CheesybeanZ
    Full Member

    10 years today , I spent the night in my car stuck near Beckford trying to get home from Kempsey too Evesham . Floating cars and caravans, tossers in 4x4s trying to get through and cause mayhem, helicopter and bloody cold rain .
    Anyone else get stuck ?

    Pickers
    Full Member

    Just up the road from you, we got sent home at lunchtime. Which was nice. Not stuck but the curry house in the village was shut for 6 months.

    IHN
    Full Member

    I walked four miles home, sometimes wading through crotch high water.

    By the Sunday, the mains water was off and didn’t come back for two weeks.

    grahamh
    Free Member

    I spend the night on the M5, between the services and the junction for the M50.

    scotroutes
    Full Member

    Was this all in the South West of England? If so, I think that’s when we were travelling back North from Cornwall and we’re worried we’d not get through. I remember the M5 looking like a causeway between flooded fields on each side.

    pictonroad
    Full Member

    Got stuck trying to get to a stag do in Newquay. Finally made via train, hitching and flight. Arrived at midnight to a heroes welcome.

    siwhite
    Free Member

    I was working a late shift in Abingdon, just on the Thames. We’d been expecting the floods for about 24 hours as it travelled downriver. I had a very rewarding evening waking every resident on a large housing estate to warn them that the floods were coming and to move all their stuff onto the first floor. I drove a competition-spec Defender at the time, and my Inspector commandeered it into the fleet for flood response work. I even found a magnetic blue light for it in the garages….

    A few days later I was given a proper Defender and dispatched for more flood work in Oxford. This is me driving (with my mate Chubb in the back) rescuing a family from some flats just off the Bottle Road…

    Bregante
    Full Member

    We were in Ilfracombe in my dad’s then 3 week old camper van. Fortunately we were in a fairly elevated location on the site so we didn’t flood but we ended up playing host to another family for much of the night after their tent was washed away into the river along with scores of others who took shelter elsewhere. One of the longest nights followed by the longest and most frustrating drive home ever. Scotroutes description of the M5 is accurate.

    phiiiiil
    Full Member

    We had to go from Malvern to Droitwich to fetch my brother after the train he was on could go no further. It would normally take easily less than an hour, it took four in the end, utter chaos. We nearly tried to use the M5; I’m so glad we didn’t, others were stuck there overnight!

    The day after we went for a ride on the Malverns – we were meant to be going to Dartmoor, but Malvern was completely cut off – and it was already bone dry on the hills… 🙂

    joat
    Full Member

    It’s my 10th wedding anniversary today! Nice day for a white off-white wedding. In laws neighbour digging a trench round the marquee, wellies to get to the toilets, tables moved because the carpet was turning into a pond, thunder during my speech, ah yes THEY ALL remembered it well

    Murray
    Full Member

    10 years ago we were driving down the M4 to Three Cliffs Bay on the Gower Peninsula with our 1 year old daughter for our first camping trip since she was born. Lots of rain and the joints in the motorway washing out. Got to the campsite and all was OK – it’s 100′ foot above the beach on sandy soil so very well draining. Came back up the M4 with lots of lane closures but basically got away with it.

    aracer
    Free Member

    For cars maybe – you could still cycle to Worcester. I live the Malvern side of where the road was closed and that’s what I did!

    Kuco
    Full Member

    I was working clearing blockages and trash screens.

    Drac
    Full Member

    I watched it on TV.

    CaptainFlashheart
    Free Member

    I spent a lovely weekend with friends, canoeing down the Wye. 😀

    We went from Ross to Symonds Yat, drank far too much and snored heavily in the Saracen’s, then bobbed downstream to Monmouth.

    We didn’t paddle much!

    CountZero
    Full Member

    Watching the local Beeb news tonight talking about it, they were covering the Gloucestershire floods, but there were the floods on the Levels as well, but I think they were more recent, and it was some years before some poor souls got their homes back.
    I did think “Christ, was it really ten years ago?” 😯

    PePPeR
    Full Member

    I was in Hereford working with a mate, I said to him, let’s cracked on and get home ASAP as I live just the other side of Stratford upon Avon, getting to Evesham hadn’t been too bad, picked up a coffee at McDonald’s who were flooded out half an hour later, after that it took me 3 hours to get home 25 miles, we were driving through water over the top of my Transits floor, and having to divert around the big stuff by miles, the main queue was caused by other drivers being inconsiderate at one place and the driver on our side of the road (which was clear) not pushing through. Wow it as an experience!

    Took me months to get the water out of my headlights…

    Stoner
    Free Member

    Somehow I was very lucky to make it back on the train from London. There were very few ways over the rivers Severn and Avon open, but the trainline was one of them until flooding at Oxford stopped the line.

    I managed to get some blurry screenshots off BBC24. My brother currently lives in the building at the bottom of this one above the F of “Flood”, although he didnt 10yrs ago. Fortunately he is in a 3nd floor flat of the converted mill so while he might get cut off, he wont flood.

    And looking southwards towards Tewkesbury. My dad and I spent the next few days helping a friend who’s pub had flooded so badly, the optics were full of floodwater…

    trailwagger
    Free Member

    I was working in Tewkesbury at the time. When we were sent home at lunchtime I tried every route out of town (to get to Hereford) and they were all blocked. Ended up going up the motorway to Worcester. Never witnessed anything like it, the M5 by the services was a river! Then driving through water on the Worcester – Bromyard road that was coming over the bonnet of my Honda Civic. Some Tw*t in 4×4 came ploughing through a flood in the opposite direction and the bow wave he caused lifted my car off the road! The force of the water running across the road nearly carried my car off it!

    Frightening, i remember the whole day felt like the apocalypse. Five hours to get home on a normal 45 minute journey.

    IHN
    Full Member

    My dad and I spent the next few days helping a friend who’s pub had flooded so badly, the optics were full of floodwater…

    Which pub was that?

    Alex
    Full Member

    It was the summer before we moved here (Ledbury) so we would have missed the worst of it, were it not for us driving to Devon for a family holiday. Coming off the A34 the roundabout was mostly underwater. I remember a BMW floating on it! Somehow we made it round, climbed up the ramp to the M4 just before they shut it behind us.

    That drive west was surreal. Rain so hard I could barely see the road and bow waves being thrown over the car from the other carriageway!

    Stoner
    Free Member

    http://www.yewtreeinn.co.uk/

    this was taken before the peak

    The problem at Chacely is the flood gates stay closed holding water back on the marsh until the river level has fallen quite a way. Often means the pub is closed for weeks at a time. It very rarely flooded though. Until 2007.

    IHN
    Full Member

    Funnily enough, I was having a chat about the Yewtree the other day and wondering if it was still open.

    We rode over from Churchdown to the Red Lion (obviously we could only go to pubs on this side of the river…) and it was mental…

    stevied
    Free Member

    Had to walk home from Ledbury to Malvern as all exits from Ledbury were properly flooded. There was a waterfall about 15ft wide gushing off the railway bridge which meant trains weren’t running.
    A lad from school’s dad got washed away, in his car, on the Worcester to Peshore Rd.

    Stoner
    Free Member

    I havent been down there for quite a while, but Roly still runs it.

    The other day the family and I went swimming in the Avon at Twynning at the Fleet. Lovely spot to go in for some open water swimming. Pity the beer is all Wadworths though 🙁

    Pook
    Full Member

    i was living in Riverside Exchange in Sheffield. Couldn’t get in the house for a day, and then lived with the stench of sewers for months after. Dank, horrible.

    Digby
    Full Member

    I remember driving through Hillsborough in North West Sheffield the day after the worst of the flooding – it was surreal – like a scene from ’28 Days Later’.

    maxtorque
    Full Member

    more importantly, 10 YEARS! Where did they go?? 😆

    footflaps
    Full Member

    IIRC ac282 and I were delayed on the M4 trying to drive down to an NPS race at Newnham Park near Plymouth….

    FunkyDunc
    Free Member

    more importantly, 10 YEARS! Where did they go??

    That was my first thought 😯 🙁

    Speeder
    Full Member

    I was living in Malvern and working in Stonehouse near Stroud at the time and that weekend was the last opportunity I’d have to get over to Amsterdam to see my fiance before the wedding.

    Drove to work in some pretty bad conditions but thought nothing really of it. After 4 hours of some of the heaviest continuous rain anyone had ever seen we all decided to split from work an hour early at 12 (thank god for early finish Fridays) and head home. I took the cross country route back and ended up wading through some pretty deep puddles around Maismore?Hartpury/Staunton but it was just surface water at that point and no more than 1/2 a wheel high so the trusty old £400 A4 (RIP) coped admirably. Got home within the hour to hear they’d cancelled the trains to Birmingham so it was a matter of getting in the car and heading there on the roads. I tried 4 different ways out of town all of which were impassable for one reason or another before fighting using some of the back roads into the higher (Glos) side of Upton and over the bridge to the A38. The most nerve wracking bit of the journey was the long wade through Kempsey where I lucked out with a steady drive up the middle of the road keeping a good bow wave in front and not seeing anyone really doing anything daft to stop me in front.

    It took just over 4 hours to get from Malvern to BHX and I just made the flight. The fiance had been watching it all on the TV over there and couldn’t believe I’d made it. It was certainly a memorable day and I won’t now buy anything within 20 feet of a river or at the bottom of a hill.

    bungle
    Full Member

    Next week isn’t it? Anyone else going camping?

    antigee
    Full Member

    lived out north of Sheffield and the kids who were at primary then still talk about being passed across the road outside the school from hand to hand across the fierce run off which turned towards Sheffield at the bottom of the hill and took the main road out for something like 2 years

    rain slowed early evening and thought nothing of it until turned tv news on and then looked out the window and could see the rescue helicopters lined up over wharncliffe woods ready to fly in turn to pick people off roofs down in the Don Valley

    doris5000
    Full Member

    i was at a festival. Left my flooded tent and got out of there on Friday morning, drove round Reading until we found a hotel that had any rooms free – practically the last rooms in town, as they were just stopping the rail services – and tried to dry off. Would’ve gone home if I hadn’t been due to perform the next day! Later figured out that the cost of the hotel, some food, new clothes and the stuff that got destroyed was substantially more than the fee I got for playing. Hey ho 😆

    But yeah – getting off site from the festival, there were just huge streams of people trudging through knee-deep water, shivering, carrying all their belongings, while it was still chucking it down. Really felt weirdly apocalyptic

    blurty
    Full Member

    My then boss, a verified tosser was making his way home when he rounded a bend and saw a bloke frantically waving at him to stop.

    ‘F&*k off’ thought Simon, ‘he’s hardly got his wellies wet’, so bollocked on on until the current caught him and jammed him against a wall, the whole car pretty much under-water by now. He was lucky to get a window open and slip out.

    The chap who was trying to warn him had been standing on a submerged wall.

    Oh how we laughed

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