Flood alert

The Government website has a page with flood alerts.

There is currently an alert for the brook that runs through our village in Cambridgeshire:

River levels have risen … as a result of persistent rainfall. Consequently, flooding of property/roads and farmland is possible today, 10/03/23 … We are closely monitoring the situation. Our incident response staff are checking defences. Please avoid contact with flood water.

In the 24 years we’ve lived here surface water on the roads has been commonplace after several days of rain, but a full scale flood is rare.

In January 2013 the High Street and surrounding area was flooded, and the same happened in December 2020, two days before Christmas.

Our house is a few hundred yards from the brook, and up a slight incline, so the threat to our property was minimal.

Where our cul-de-sac meets the High Street, however, the water rose by as much as three or four feet, making it impossible to access our house by road until the water level receded.

On December 23, 2020, after doing some Christmas shopping, I returned home around 4.00pm.

Our cul-de-sac was still accessible - there was only light surface water on the road - but thinking that the water level might rise overnight, blocking me in, I parked the car on the other side of the brook, thinking it would be safe to leave it there until the morning.

In hindsight I should have parked several hundred yards further back but no-one anticipated how quickly the brook would burst its banks.

At 8.00pm, when I attempted to walk from my house to the car (which had our Christmas turkey in the back!), I was confronted - at the bottom of our road - by three feet of rapidly moving water flowing along the High Street.

I hoped that the water on the other side of the brook - where my car was parked - might be lower so I stupidly attempted to wade through the water, hoping to reach the little stone bridge that crosses the brook.

It was dark and the road and flood water were only illuminated by a few relatively dim street lamps. Worse, the water was not only moving quite rapidly, it was also freezing cold.

Looking back I don’t know why I even attempted to do what I did, but luckily I came to my senses when the water was up to my thighs and it occurred to me that if I slipped and fell I might be swept away, which is roughly what befell a building worker in 1998, the year before we moved in to the one of the new houses he was working on.

(What actually happened is that he tried to drive across the ford in heavy rain. It was dark so he didn’t see that the water in the brook had risen several feet, and his car was swept downstream. They found his body the following day.)

In my defence I was concerned about the fate of my car, which was only a year old, and the turkey, but I realise now how unimportant they were in the overall scheme of things.

As it happens, the car was indeed a write-off (flood water destroyed the electrics) but the insurance company paid up within days without quibbling (and I also had GAP insurance) so the financial hit wasn’t too bad.

And at least I was alive!

Anyway, I’m off to buy a newspaper from the local shop. While I’m doing that I’ll check the current state of the brook.

Wish me luck.

PS. I hope this doesn’t sound too flippant. A number of houses in the village have suffered very badly from flooding, especially those on either side of the brook.

After the flood in December 2020 a number of families were forced to leave their homes for six to nine months until the damage was repaired.

Despite this, houses in those areas still sell quite quickly. I’m not sure I would want to live with the threat of future floods hanging over me.

Above: bottom of our road, December 24, 2020; below: High Street, January 2013