Work/life balance: Making time for floods.

Published on July 23rd, 2007 by Jeremy Chatfield

This view looks out over the field to the southwest of the house. The far line of trees, on the near horizon, marks the normal far edge of the river, which is usually about 10 to 20 metres (30 to 60 feet) wide. The visible water here averages about 1 metre (3 feet) deep, across a field that normally grazes about 300 sheep.

At 15:00, the river was 200 metres away (600 feet) and had started to creep over the bank. It is rising at about 4 cm (one and a half inches) per hour, over the last hour, across about 400 metres at present (about 1200 feet). That puts it about 20 to 40 hours from the house…

Sometimes you have to go with the flow. We’re packing now. The floods in 2003 came to the bottom of the garden, where this was taken. The waters are rising faster now, than they did back then. According to the sheep farmer, our house was above the 1947 floods. Parts of the UK are seeing floods higher than anything in the last 200 years. Previously, it took several days to go from overflowing the banks to flooding the bottom of the garden.

Rain is expected tomorrow (Tuesday), here. Nothing is certain, but I’d rather get ready now and be wrong, than start a panic activity in the middle of the night. I’ll still forget crucial stuff, of course.

Wednesday, 25th

After a strange bounce, where the level dropped 10cm yesterday afternoon, and came back up to almost the maximum level for this morning, it’s now dropped almost a metre. I can see most of the field, or the grass, at least, above the water. I guess the rapid rise and rapid fall is a result of the way that the water arrived – a huge rainburst. Had the rain been more sustained, I suspect the rise and fall would have been longer, with farmland slowing the response of the river system. What’s intriguing is that we had two distinct rain pulses, but it looks like the river floods once – the short period rise wasn’t anywhere near enough, nor the time delay… If there is a second pulse, then it should arrive within the next 24 hours.

Thursday, 26th

The water level has dropped – no second surge. Whew. We’ve started moving everything back. There’s even sheep now grazing where there was flood water. The bridges that control one of the three access roads to the village were flooded for a day or so – fairly normal for flooding here. It makes for a detour of about six miles for most places outside the village.

The speed of both rise and fall are far greater than anything we’ve seen before. The rains we saw last week were quite intense, though not up to the vertical rivers that drenched us in Austin, Texas every so often. Though they might not have had the intensity of a Texan storm, they lasted longer. On the news we hear that unusual rainfall (or lack of it) are likely to become more common. Flood plains are going to be important for controlling water and helping direct it to longer term storage for periods of drought.

I guess we need to keep an active plan for flood preparedness, and generally keep a little more of our stuff out of reach of potential floods. And we need to keep an ear on the news for rains in the catchment area of the river basin. The Environment Agency website offers flood warnings and maps of where the flood levels will get to with severe flooding, but it doesn’t show the current situation – just the general risk. And the text based descriptions of the alerts don’t seem tied to the maps. So you don’t know whether the communities upstream are facing rapid severe floods or slowly rising moderate floods. It seems to take the water about two hours to reach us from Felmersham and about 12 to 18 hours from Newport Pagnell. By keeping an eye on what is happening there and calling some friends who live upstream, it’ll give us some better warning.

Panic over. Normal service will now be resumed.