Saturday 21 November 2009

cumbria floods in appleby

we have had i bit of rain this week in fact bloody loads of it
in just over a day we got four and a half inches of it - but considering it has hardly stopped raining for the past few weeks there was no where for it to goso hey presto it flooded the flood alarms went off in the morning and everyone put out the sand bags and the flood barriers came up - no problem they thought just another flood we are used to it - it happens often here ......

nope not this time, this was a lot worse than normal in just over an hour it was up and over the river bank and over the main road - a rise of about 6 to 8 foot from the normal height of the river
as you can see from the pictures no one is panicking they are just getting on with it - it has happened before and it will happen again - lots of expence and inconvenience not to mention huge amounts of cleaning up and drying things out

but appleby is a resiliant place and we will get over it give it a week or so and all will be back to normal - most normal visitors wont even know anything ever happened here
so why is this - look at the last picture and see why - big flood defences - these were put in years ago a great expence and keep the main part of the town from flooding
these are a combination of physical barriers and large water pumps which up to press have worked well - appleby with its history of flooding was well ahead of the game and worked hard to prevent flooding in the future - looks like it is time for an update but at least it saved us from the worst


my heart goes out to the people of the other towns who were flooded - cockermouth,workington,maryport,keswick etc - lets just hope their councils all bite the bullet and re-do their flood defences before the next freak storm - which seem to happen more often now with this global warming lark - and a special mention to the police officer who lost his life at workington doing his job trying to get people away from a bridge before it was washed away from underneath him - to his family our thoughts are with you