Eventually the water began to go down but a phenomenon they called ponding meant that in low lying areas like our road there could be nowhere for it to go. So we were left literally with a pond, our triangle of land still ankle to shin deep in water. The fire brigade were on pumping duty at various points around the village but while more than one crew took a look at our plight it wasn't clear where they could pump it to.
They poked around in our soakaways and tried to pump them clear but confirmed what we suspected that they didn't really go anywhere. Eventually they decided pumping was the only solution and pumped water into the garage from where it could drain to the main road.
What about the water in the house you may ask? Well by this time the water in the house had subsided but it took a visiting builder some time later to point out the significance of this. We didn't have to pump water out of the house so logically it had gone down through the floor. The significance, as he pointed out, is it was likely it had come in the same way in which case no amount of sand bagging would have kept it out. We were certainly in our view victims of the flood relief scheme, bungling by the Environment Agency and neglect by one or two local landowners but the exceptional weather and the very high water table had also played its part. Our consolation, global warming apart, is that, to now at any rate, these have been once in a generation circumstance. Nothing like this had happened since 1947 and hopefully it wouldn't happen again for a while.
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Flooded - A JustWriteIt TrueStory
Non-FictionFor a few weeks in February 2014 our village was the centre of media attention. The Thames burst its banks and flowed through the Main Street. Life took on a surreal quality. The media descended on us, the army and the fire brigade pitched in and ev...
