Excerpt
1
Britain's Wet Season
It was still raining, and York station was in complete chaos. The railway track was underwater both north and east of the city, and trains for Edinburgh, Newcastle and Aberdeen were terminating there, disgorging their tired and confused passengers into the mêlée. People dragged their luggage in and out of crowded waiting rooms as train after train listed on the display board was cancelled. Harassed staff tried to show passengers alternative routes via local buses, whilst others simply fled from the station concourse, pursued by angry travellers demanding to know how they could ever reach their destinations.
It was the beginning of November 2000. By the end of the month Britain would have experienced some of the heaviest rainfall and worst flooding ever recorded. On the miserable Friday night I arrived in York, newspapers and radio shows were already buzzing with speculation. This wasn't normal, everyone agreed. Floods had come and gone before, and Britain was supposed to be rainy. But no one could remember anything like this. There had to be some new explanation.
October had also been a washout. On 11 October Kent, Sussex and Hampshire received ten centimetres of rain - more than a month's usual average in a single day. Sixty government flood warnings were issued for the southeast of England, and the residents of Uckfield awoke to find their town centre under more than a metre of water. Lifeboats rescued people stranded in their homes, and one shopkeeper was washed away by the rising flood as he tried
to open his shop door. Horrified neighbours looked on as he was sucked down the high street by the torrent. 'He didn't even have a chance to scream, the water was so fierce,' one told a Guardian journalist. ('"Unheard of" rain sweeps the south' was the newspaper's dramatic headline.
1) Happily, the shopkeeper was later found clinging to a riverbank.
Close by, a supermarket's windows caved in under the pressure of the water, and stock began to float off the shelves and away down the street. In Lewes, a town downstream on the same river, council staff had to drive around with a loudhailer warning residents in low-lying areas to evacuate to higher ground. Six lifeboatmen were lucky to escape with their lives when their boat was nearly trapped under a bridge.
And still it kept on raining. The government's countryside minister, Elliot Morley, was one of the first to acknowledge something unusual when he visited the area the next day. 'We seem to be having more violent weather patterns and we accept that it could be due to global warming,'
he said.2
Was the minister right? Had climate change indeed come home to Britain?
York was dark and eerily deserted. The heavy rain had turned to heavy sleet, and just a few cars splashed through the huge puddles that had gathered in the road. I walked along beside the old city walls, down towards the river.
The Ouse was almost unrecognisable. There was no sign of a riverbank - instead the water reached right round the buildings on both sides, and was almost touching the top of the arches of the road bridge. In the glow of the streetlights it looked as slick as oil, but also seemed to be moving impossibly fast, swirling forcefully around the stones of the bridge. In both directions streets which had usually led to boatyards, pubs and restaurants were deserted, the bustle
of people replaced with lapping black water.
The worst of the rain had fallen two days earlier, when an intense depression - the remnants of an Atlantic hurricane - crossed the country, dumping several inches on the Pennine Hills. With the ground already saturated from previous deluges, the new water simply sluiced off into the rivers Nidd, Wharfe and Aire. The Aire valley was particularly hard-hit, and in the Yorkshire towns of Keighley, Skipton and Bingley families had been forced to camp out in leisure centres and bed and breakfast accommodation. Further downstream in Leeds the runoff overtopped embankments usually eight metres above the water level, turning city streets into canals temporarily reminiscent of Venice.
York is often hit by floods, but it was soon apparent that this disaster was off the usual scale. The day before I arrived, the Archbishop of York had paddled around his palace in a dinghy, whilst tourist rowing boats had been commandeered to evacuate an old people's home. That day the water was within half a metre of breaching flood defences, which would have submerged another seven hundred houses.
On 2 November, as I peered over the bridge at the rising River Ouse, the nationwide floods were already the most extensive on record. But the worst was yet to come.
Copyright 2004 by Mark Lynas