My experience of the UK flooding in 2007
January 8, 2008
I thought I’d post my experience of the major floods that hit the UK last Summer. This was written on 20th July 2007:
Well I had an interesting day yesterday (as did many others in the UK). I was working out of the Newbury Business Park [West Berkshire, South England] yesterday (not my usual place of work). It had been raining (and raining *hard*) since I woke up at 5am. News filtered through the office at about 1pm or a little earlier that Vodafone’s HQ [I used to work for the telecoms company] had been evacuated as it was flooded and had lost power. People were being sent home because if they couldn’t get home now they would definitely not be able to later.
So I decided to bugger off once it was likely that everyone would be sent home. I stood at the bus stop for 20mins waiting for the VF shuttle bus but nothing. I could hear police and ambulance sirens going back and forth but couldn’t see the road. I overheard form his phone call that the guy next to me had been there for 40mins so definitely something was wrong as shuttles are normally bang on time. The rain stopped just before 2pm so I chose to walk to the train station and by just walking around the corner I could see why there were no buses - cars, lots of them, not moving at all and all the way down the A4 road! I carried on towards the station, on route to Newbury station a colleague walked by saying Thatcham station was completely under water [the station near my home] so I headed for Newbury station to check if I could get home but found this…
You can just about see the track, so that’s a whole lot of water. Guess what, I had to walk home. 
I’ve walked home before with a broken bike and also along the canal (there and back) and normally took an hour and a quarter but this was something else. The A4 was only slightly moving when I returned to it to get home. The side coming from Thatcham was fine but heading towards it was near-static. I decided to go down Lower Way [road] as it’s a shorter route to my home near [Thatcham[ station but this was one of the pics I took while going down it.
Basically most of the lower part of Lower Way was like this. People had to walk up on the hill and on the grass to walk along the road. Cars were being turned back up and onto the A4!! A few cars and a van has been abandoned, stuck in the middle of this. It didn’t help that water was furiously gushing down from the hill in 2 or 3 places and that this was all right next to the sewage works (my soaked-through work shoes went straight in the bin when I got back). I had parts of my journey where I was walking in water well over my ankles.
It didn’t get much better once I got off this road and onto Station Road. This and roads off it were totally water logged and you could see people had just given up and parked their car anywhere they could and walked the rest of their journey. I think ti was 2 hours later (could have been a lot more) by the time I came up to my house. I was fearing the worse, thinking my house was flooded but thankfully it wasn’t and have to admit being one of the lucky ones
I didn’t go down to see but Thatcham station was supposed to be even worse than Newbury station. Going pass it this morning it was OK but the grass area at the front of the pub near it had 2 mini swimming pools in it. Parts of roads in my residential estate were still flooded and you could see a few houses with piles of rubbish from their homes sitting outside their doors.
Wow that was some rainfall!
(both these pics were taken with my N73 mobile phone)
UPDATE:
It was a terrible day and we are now told to expect this on a more regularly basis. I was told that Thatcham was one of the worst hit and aerial shots appeared on the BBC news the following days. When I left Vodafone in October I think the HQ was still not fully operational so that shows have much damage that day made.
Country-wide there are still people living out of caravans or temporary accommodation, flood precautions are still not in place in lots of areas but luckily we have not had a day like that since.
.kol tregaskes.photography site: squashyfrog.com
.photography blog: blog.squashyfrog.com
.flickr photostream: flickr.com/photos/koltregaskes
.deviantart gallery: koltregaskes.deviantart.com
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