The hell of high water

The floodwater that devastated the Cornish village of Boscastle had barely begun receding when it became clear to Ann Hughes that her next day at work would be far from ordinary.

Hughes, a sheltered housing manager at North Cornwall council, received news she would be on emergency standby just hours after a flash flood crashed through Boscastle on 16 August, sweeping cars along with it and leaving layers of mud and terrible damage in its wake.

The following day she came face to face with the aftermath of one the most dramatic natural disasters to have occurred in Britain for a generation – and went from ordinary housing employee to emergency support worker in less than 24 hours.

“People had lost everything,” she says. “Cars had been washed into the harbour; homes were covered in mud and silt. One woman had lived in a campervan that had been swept away – all she had left was what she was wearing.”

Hughes’ bosses had predicted a housing crisis with hundreds of people forced to leave their homes for their own safety. But when their worst fear failed to materialise, housing workers such as Hughes provided invaluable help to residents as they tried to find out the extent of the damage to their property and recover what possessions they could.

Hughes helped coordinate the emergency centre in the nearby town of Camelford and spent most of the week escorting residents back into Boscastle to retrieve valuables. The town was sealed off soon after the disaster and only reopened last Thursday.

“People couldn’t really judge the scale of the devastation,” says Hughes. “But when they were taken down into the village for the first time there was total shock.

“Most of the businesses were destroyed; water had been up to the ceiling in a number of the shops. Some of the buildings had such bad structural damage that they’ll have to be pulled down altogether.”

The risk of buildings collapsing as people clambered about inside was Hughes’ biggest concern. One of her main duties was to prevent too many people entering individual properties at one time.

“It was more customer service than anything else,” she says. “People needed help clearing rubbish to get at belongings; then we needed to organise getting their stuff up to the emergency centre.”

More than 100 people were displaced by the flood – not only residents but holidaymakers, too.

A massive surge in the demand for temporary accommodation was expected. Gill Avis, senior homelessness advice officer at North Cornwall council, was put in charge of arranging homes for those who needed them.

Good neighbours

But fortunately for the council, demand for emergency accommodation has been surprisingly low because of the solidarity shown by local people, who rallied round to help their neighbours.

“Most of the residents have gone to live with friends and family,” says Avis. The woman who lost her campervan, for example, is staying with the people who owned the land where she parked her van.

For once, the high number of second homes in the area – usually a major problem in terms of pushing up prices for local homebuyers – has been a boon. Several resident families have moved temporarily to empty second homes in other villages along the Cornwall coast.

It was stranded tourists who needed the most help finding somewhere to stay in the immediate aftermath of the flood.

“Some of them didn’t know whether their cars had been washed away or not,” says Avis. “Most of those who couldn’t get back to their hotels were put up in the centre in Camelford. The next day they were able to look for their cars. We had to find bed and breakfasts for about five families, from where they were then able to make their own way home.”

One Belgian tourist who arrived in the village the day after the disaster, oblivious to what had happened, had to be found somewhere to stay in nearby Padstow.

In fact it’s not just local people who have rushed to help with the crisis. Following massive media coverage of the floods, offers of accommodation have come in from across the country, and Avis has spent a lot of her time fielding the calls.

“Several hundred people have called up – we’ve got a massive list of rooms being offered. People have even been phoning up from as far away as Braintree, in Essex,” she says.

Sewage

Although residents are now free to enter and leave the village as they please, very few are able to stay in their homes overnight. The flood seriously damaged the village’s sewage system – 300m of pipeline was completely destroyed – and electricity supplies have been affected; all of which means the council soon expects to receive its first applications for long-term help.

“There’ll have to be significant improvements to Boscastle’s infrastructure if it is to become habitable again,” says Mark Howell, head of housing at North Cornwall council.

“Nobody has said they are totally stuck yet, but we are expecting people’s short-term arrangements to start unravelling and for some of them to need long-term help.”

In the meantime, things are slowly reverting to normal.

Hughes has returned to her ordinary job as a sheltered housing manager and tourists are once again visiting Boscastle – although the chief attraction is now no longer another pretty Cornish coastal town, but the clean-up operation made famous by media coverage.

On Monday last week, the traditional Cornish singing that took place on a weekly basis in one of the village’s hotels was held on what remains of the village green – a sign that locals are starting to recover from their ordeal.

“Everyone is being very positive,” says Hughes. “People just want to get back to the village, start the clean-up and get on with their lives.”