All Water Under the Bridge
Our house as the flood recedes | Go Wild Forest School Training Online
I live with my young family in a lovely spot in the small village of Brockweir on the England – Wales border. It is a unique and charming spot with many quirks, not least it is situated on a tidal river in an area with one of the highest tidal variations in water height in the world; on a big spring tide the variation out in the main channel can be as much as 14 metres (42ft)!
With the tidal variation we are pretty used to flooding entering the ground floor of our house. I live in what historically was the old ferryman’s house and boatyard. For 300 years the stone and oak house has been tickled by the tide. I’ve been here for 10 years and came in knowledge of climate change and likely sea height changes.
It’s going to sound weird, but living with being tidally flooded is (mostly) not too bad; you have a timetable and a rough estimate of the tide heights, which along with local observation, experience and a barometer gives a good idea on what to move and when. There are always the one or two tides that catch you out but normally we’re good and it’s a price worth paying for living in a great place. The house was built to be flood resilient and I’ve spent 10 years improving that where I can.
Storm Dennis caught us out.
In 10 years this was the first time that ‘fluvial’ flooding has affected us – water from upstream rather than from the tide. The river outside our window can rise 5 meters and not enter our house so normally we shrug off storms and flooding that decimates towns further upstream with less river capacity.
What Storm Dennis brought us, following hard on the heels of Storm Ciara and a wet winter, was more than the rivers and the land could hold. People at the top of the hills locally were being flooded, our local road network all but closed off with bridges shut (or unreachable due to flooding on either side), landslides over roads and trees falling out of the sodden ground. It was a proper taste of the future.
My house was surrounded by a wild river that kept rising. At 10pm on Sunday 16th, we took the decision to lift all our possessions on the ground floor up as high as we could, stacking them on tables like crazy Jenga. About 10.30pm we lifted our own flood defences to let the house flood as it’s better to equalise pressure on the structure than try to keep the water out and have the walls pushed in. That left us wading about in thigh-deep freezing water (which really hurts!). Fortunately, our electrics are up high and our soft furnishings are on the 1st floor. This flooding was concerning, but nothing we didn’t deal with regularly, albeit normally with more notice.
By about midnight the river was still rising and I took a canoe out from the (now surrounded) house to check on the garden and my workshop where I keep all the equipment that is essential for making my living. Things weren’t looking good and the river was still rising. At 1am I took the decision to evacuate my workshop and loaded my van with everything I need to continue to make my living and raised everything else off the floor as far as possible. By 2am the water was still rising, maybe only 1-2cm every 15 minutes but at this point every millimetre was beginning to count. We’d passed what I considered to be a 50 – 100 year flood height but I still couldn’t quite bring myself to believe that the water wasn’t going to stop.
I climbed into my fully-loaded and now water-surrounded van to get it away from the flooding and turned the key… nothing happened! After 10 years of starting on the button it mysteriously had chosen now to die!
The water was so high the tables floated and flipped everything into the water | Go Wild Forest School Training
Left with few options I phoned a local friend for help but at 2am they were sensibly asleep – I needed a tow out of the water and fast! I canoed back across what was now a strong flowing and very darkly flooded garden, to my house. I woke my partner and we then locked our sleeping 2-year-old in the flood surrounded house with a mobile phone on speaker next to him so we could talk to him if he woke, and canoed back across the increasingly dangerous garden. She reversed her car as close to the flood waters as possible, our tow strap only just reached and I had to wade out into thigh deep water to attach the strap to the van which now had its tow point well under water! In the dark, in the freezing water and the rain I couldn’t get much wetter but still managed a few new expletives when I fell off the edge of the submerged drive! Fortunately we were able to tow the van just far enough that the flooding didn’t get inside it.
By 4.30am the water began to slow but was still rising, by that time there was little more to do but securely tie-off the canoe to the first floor outside door and try to sleep for a few hours until daylight.
By morning we could see the extent of the wild torrent that we were surrounded by, our fences had been pushed over by the current, our lovely wooden gates on our drive had floated away, my car was flooded to the roof and 1 tonne of kiln dried hardwood (delivered only the day before!) had fallen over onto it!
We took the decision to abandon the house for the first time since I’ve lived there. Both the cat and the dog were looking like they really needed a wee and had nowhere to go, and the flood waters were still rising and were now only a few centimetres from our living accommodation.
The local fire and rescue service came and evacuated the neighbouring houses and we prepped our canoe with belongings for a few days away. The recue services were brilliant and waded out in over chest deep water to assist us, the dog, cat and our 2-year-old son to safety. All done in a relaxed and humorous way.
Fortunately, we were able to stay at a relative’s house nearby and after 24 hours the water level began to drop again. We were able to re-enter the house within a couple of days and begin the clear up. We put out a call for help on local networks and through our local Extinction Rebellion. Well over 20 people turned up on the first day to help us with the clear up, and 10 or so people came on subsequent days. Teams of people, including the local Lions, turned up to help neighbouring properties. To all those people: THANK YOU!
The assistance was not just physical; thank you to all the people who cooked us food and brought cakes for the workforce; to Cinderhill farm who sent emergency sausage rolls for everyone helping; to the skip hire company that gave us a discount skip and the guy with the mobile jet wash who gave a fantastic discount when he helped clean silt out of all our drains; to those who lent equipment and helped in so many other ways; to those who offered accommodation, moral support and child care. We feel so amazingly privileged to be part of such a caring community. This is truly the best of humanity and the spirit that we need to recognise within ourselves for the coming storms, because there will be more.
Being in a position where we have no flood insurance (uninsurable), we are not covered for losses or damage. Fortunately the car did have insurance and we have been paid for that (although in my experience it never reflects all the value of the work that in almost inevitably done just before a car is written off!). Hugely flood resilient as we are, we still have to count the cost in £1,000s. Repairs, extra electricity bills running dehumidifiers, fans and jet hoses, two weeks off self-employed work for my partner and me, the sleepless nights while our young son can’t sleep because of the changes, the loss of our vegetable garden (all top soil washed away), gates, fences, damaged tools and equipment, skip hire and all our firewood floating off down the river Wye.
In many ways we are the lucky ones, those locals with insurance are in several cases still in emergency accommodation, two weeks later, unable to return to their houses. Houses that are being pulled apart by teams of builders who are throwing out their kitchens, carpets, sofas, the bottom meter of their living room walls… and what next? Who will insure them next time and at what cost? Who will buy their houses when they want to move?
Once the water has left, there are soggy things and lots and lots of very fine silt. | Go Wild Online Forest School Training
When you can’t trust the weather how can you plan? This flood water was 50cm higher than the earliest local records which have been kept since 1700. February was the wettest February ever - what new records will we hear being broken next week?
What this has shown me is that it is in times of crisis that community counts. I also feel lucky that we’ve been hit early in the climate change game, a time where the community still has time energy and resources to spare to help with the recovery. I can see a time when this sort of emergency could become more regular, more demoralising, more tiring. It is those times we need to prepare for and mitigate against by challenging the status quo that is sending our planet’s life support systems hurtling over the edge of yet another tipping point.
This is not just happening on the news, this is happening here and now, and if it hasn’t affected you yet then it will. Nothing short of a radical shift in our carbon production and lifestyles has a hope of mitigating the worst effects of climate breakdown. If we don’t want societal breakdown then we need to come together just as we do in the face of disaster, throw off the phony narrative of every man for himself and act every day like we would in a crisis, because we are in a crisis.
Dunkirk spirit wasn’t unique to Dunkirk, that is the spirit shown by the best of humanity wherever threat lies. Let’s be our best and make the best of all we still have while there is still enough of us to make the difference. Be the change we want to see.
It’s not how bad you’re hit, it’s how fast you can recover. Together we are stronger.
UPDATE: Thursday 12th March, by Jackie
Last night the river gauge at Shrapness Dock on the River Severn hit its highest level since 1935. High winds, an area of low pressure and a sudden tidal surge, combined with high water tables and river levels, meant that we were inundated yet again. We were prepared for a high tide that should have been about 60cm on our ground floor, instead we had well over a metre, with a surge of 10cm in the space of about 3 minutes. ‘Luckily’ very little was left to get damaged from the previous flooding but there was a miserable 20 minutes when I couldn’t find the cat. He was out in the garden but is smart enough to have got himself to higher ground. We watched by torchlight as yet more firewood floated off along the Wye. Once the tide turned, the water then left the garden almost as quickly as it arrived.
This morning, the sun was shining and the wind had dropped. I got up early and collected my remaining raised beds that had luckily been stopped, only just, by the fences and tied them up. I reset the garden ready for the next hit and then took our son to nursery. In the 40 minutes I was gone, the whole of the very long garden was submerged deeper than the top of my wellies. The last of the firewood made its escape (can you tell we’re sore about that?!?). It was an unusual experience for me to be outside of the house while it flooded and interesting to see it from another (drier) perspective. The highlight has to be three Environment Agency subcontractors who had come to fit flood defences on the houses being trapped for over an hour on top of a log store roof! Then we were back to normal to carry on with our day, until about 9:30 this evening when the tide will come in and it’ll start all over again. It’ll be like this until at least Sunday. But at least with tidal flooding we know when it’s going to happen and roughly how much. Fluvial flooding is a whole different matter.