The Great Flood

by Edward Platt

  ~

  The Parrett, which had been a dark, foam-flecked channel when I walked along it in the dusk, seven months before, had subsided to a narrow trickle, at the bottom of a deep, wide ditch. The bank that divided it from the houses seemed unnecessarily high, though I had seen for myself that it wasn’t. Its transformation didn’t surprise me, for I had seen the same thing many times before. Yet there was one element of the short walk behind the village that I could not reconcile with my memories of the previous time I had been there: halfway along the path, I reached a fence and had to clamber over it.

  ‘You don’t remember it because it wasn’t there,’ Glen Ward said, when I arrived at his house. The farmer had taken it down during the flood, but as soon as the water had gone down, he had put it up again, for he was tired of people lumbering across his land. The Thorney bypass, as people called it, was closed, and other barriers were going up again.

  Glen felt ‘a slight sadness’ that everything was back to normal. One of his neighbours had told him that a lot of good things would come out of the flood, and he thought that was true, though you had to be careful who you said it to. ‘There are a lot of different characters, and the people who seem to be coping with it sometimes aren’t. Emotions seesaw. It wasn’t like 2012, when it was over in a week – blink and you miss it.’ It had lasted a long time: the Wards’ house was flooded for two months, though the water had come and gone three times, which made it worse. It didn’t finally go down until early March.

  At first, he enjoyed using the canoe, and it had given them some self-sufficiency, but the flood had been all-consuming in other ways. He didn’t work for two months because he had to tend the pumps. They camped out in their bedroom, which was in the loft, though they had to put on wellies to come downstairs. Later, they brought in a caravan and lived in the yard.

  Most of their neighbours had left. The Australian woman who lived next door went home to visit family, and, when she came back, the house was still flooded. Their other neighbour, Professor Temperley, still hadn’t moved back in. At first, they had been ignored, but once the scale of the disaster was apparent, the police took over, and they were wise enough to send in officers ‘with people skills’, Glen said. ‘When all the agencies turned up – too late, though that wasn’t their fault – they were quite good. All the people helping were good; they were very mindful that we had been sorting ourselves out for three weeks, so they came in light-footed.’

  The insurance company appointed a builder to do the repairs, but he wanted to lock them out of the house, put a canteen in the yard and turn it into a building site. Having looked after the house throughout the flood, Glen wasn’t going to have that, so he took a lump sum and did the work himself. He had stripped the walls and floor in the hall and had taken up the floor in the kitchen. The rest of the house was coming together. He made most of the furniture himself; he said it was easier to point out the things he hadn’t made, in the kitchen where we were sitting, than the ones he had. It hadn’t been entirely straightforward. He had stepped on a nail when he was taking down a stud partition, and had to go to hospital. He got the fire engine to take him to Muchelney, where he got the boat to Langport. It was the only time in two months that he made the trip.

  His memories of the flood were already hazy. Looking back on it, he said, it seemed surreal. The thick blanket of water that had been drawn across the Levels had a lulling, disorientating effect. Yet Glen remembered laughing more than he had for a long time, and he remembered meeting people that he might not have met if it hadn’t been for the flood. ‘It was nice talking to people – and you had time to do it. Somerset’s a really friendly county – I’ve never come across a friendlier place. You always have time to get to know people, but add water into the mix and there’s even more time. So there was an upside to it.’

  The American writer Rebecca Solnit described a similar feeling in the aftermath of the Loma Prieta earthquake in San Francisco, in 1989: ‘I was thrown into an intensely absorbing present,’ she wrote, in a book called A Paradise Built in Hell. There was no word for the post-disaster realm ‘in which the wonderful comes wrapped in the terrible, joy in sorrow, courage in fear,’ though she attempted to define how it felt: ‘that sense of immersion in the moment and solidarity with others caused by the rupture in everyday life, an emotion graver than happiness but deeply positive.’ Unlike J. G. Ballard, who suggests we are energized and enlivened by the descent into chaos, Solnit says, ‘we cannot welcome disaster’, but ‘we can value the responses, both practical and psychological’, for, in the ‘suspension of usual order and the failure of most systems, we are free to live and act another way.’

  Floods are transformative, as well as earthquakes: they create as well as destroy. The hurricanes and storms that devastate the Caribbean at intermittent intervals also strip vegetation and renew the soil. They drive migrations to America and Europe, seeding new communities around the world. The devastating Mississippi floods of 1927 drove the spread of the blues, for they forced the musicians from the Delta to move north to cities like Chicago.

  And some practical-minded people relished the prospect of a flood as a challenge to be met: I had heard about someone who had built his own defences around his house in Somerset and was eager to try them out; and a friend of a friend was building a lighthouse in Glastonbury, on the northern edge of the Levels. Yet Solnit’s idea of a paradise that ‘arises in hell’ was tested by Hurricane Katrina, which struck New Orleans in 2005. ‘Katrina wasn’t a disaster,’ she wrote. ‘It was a catastrophe, far larger in scale than almost anything in American history . . . 80 percent of New Orleans was flooded, all vital services were wrecked or suspended, and ninety thousand square miles of the coastal south were declared a disaster area.’ The storm was only the start. The ‘somewhat natural disaster’ of Hurricane Katrina was compounded by the ‘strictly unnatural disaster of the failing levees’, and then by the ‘failure or refusal of successive layers of government to supply evacuation and relief, and the appalling calamity of the way that local and then state and federal authorities decided to regard victims as criminals and turned New Orleans into a prison city . . .’

  The trauma of Katrina was not only the terrible storm and flood – ‘the waters in which bodies floated and poisonous snakes swam, the heat that blistered skin and killed many, the apocalyptic days in which people gave birth and died on freeway overpasses surrounded by unclean waters’ – it was also the sense of ‘being abandoned by their fellow human beings and their government.’ The disaster in New Orleans was ‘so horrific that it begat little of the ebullience of many other disasters,’ she wrote. Besides, New Orleans didn’t need to assert community spirit in the way of other cities, for it had it anyway. So did Somerset, Glen Ward said. Even Rita Dobson, who had found less to enjoy in the flood, felt closer to the people who had flooded than the ones further up the road who hadn’t.

  Yet there was one person who confounded the stories of a community united in the face of a crisis in the most egregious way, by directing the flood waters away from his house and towards his neighbours. Lee Goddard lived in Hambridge, four miles west of Thorney, and only a few hundred metres from Slabgate Sluice, which controls the flow of water from the River Isle on to Westmoor. Slabgate Sluice is often opened during the summer to irrigate the moor for cattle grazing, and, as the weather worsened and the rivers rose in December, Goddard smashed the padlock with a crowbar, releasing 45,000 litres of water into Westmoor. He then filled the mechanism with screws, so it couldn’t close again.

  He didn’t try to disguise what he had done; he boasted about it at a New Year’s Eve party. The Parrett Internal Drainage Board heard the story and brought a case against him. Thorney would have flooded anyway. But his intervention meant that the water rose higher and stayed for longer. ‘I believe my father is not in his house today because of the actions of this man in Hambridge,’ Julian Temperley said, when Goddard’s conviction was reported, and Rita Dobson said they might
not have flooded at all, given that the difference was a matter of centimetres.

  He was fined £1,000 and will go down in the records as the first person in Britain to be convicted of opening a sluice gate. Yet he is not the first person to have done it. In the Somerset Levels, villages often turned against each another in an attempt to save themselves. In one recorded instance in 1894, water reached the upper storeys of the houses in Langport, and a group of villagers set out to cut a bank and divert the flood to Aller, only to be turned back by people from Aller who were guarding their embankment, which had been cut three years before. Not surprisingly, people have always acted in unneighbourly ways when floods threaten their houses. Yet even such interventions did not distract people from the real target of their rage.

  ~

  It had started raining again at the beginning of February, and, on the night of 5 February – the day that the storms ruptured the railway lines at Dawlish – a police helicopter equipped with loudspeakers had flown over Moorland and told the residents to get out. The marines of 40 Commando were sent in to help evacuate the village: the colleagues of the soldiers who had surveyed the drowned fields from Burrow Mump were finally given a role.

  The water had been rising on the moors since Christmas, but people were used to that and they didn’t pay much attention, said a man cutting a new path in the turf in the front garden of his house by the church in Moorland. He didn’t want to tell me his name, but he did want to tell me what had happened, for he felt they had been let down.

  I had walked to Moorland along the banks of the Parrett, following its straight course through the fields that had flooded in the winter. It was a clear day, with a bright blue sky, though a strong wind was blowing. The Parrett was low within its banks, a dark brown stream overhung by clumps of yellow weeds. The river began to slow as it reached the glass-and-concrete frame of Midelney Pumping Station, which was emitting a low, contented hum. Other reed-planted channels converged on the Parrett from the west, in an arrangement as complex as a motorway interchange. During the flood, Glen Ward and his wife used to walk up to the pumping station and look back across the lake to the village. ‘There is a magnificent side to this extreme weather,’ he had said. ‘You just don’t want to be in the middle of it.’ I understood what he meant; and yet, as Burrow Mump came into sight, beyond Langport, and I realized I was walking across the bottom of the lake I had surveyed from the summit of the hill, I was conscious of the double-ness I had felt in other places – an awareness that the water had only just gone down and might come up again, for flooding was not an aberration, but the restoration of a natural state. The houses beside the road from Burrowbridge to Moorland were being renovated, and, further on, diggers were stripping the bank, reducing it to sloping strips of mud: the dredging of the rivers, which the locals had wanted, had begun.

  There were vans waiting at the entrance to Moorland, for the road is only open at certain times of the day. There were piles of bricks and building materials stacked in the gardens of the boarded-up houses, and Portaloos, skips, shipping containers, vans and mobile homes were parked in the driveways. Builders – shaven-headed and tattooed – moved in and out of the gutted buildings.

  A Portakabin had taken the place of the town hall; inside, it was papered with letters from schoolchildren sending best wishes for a speedy recovery. There was much to do, for the roads that forked in the centre of the village and ran in diverging lines towards the Parrett had become rivers in the flood, the man who lived beside the church told me. The water had poured along them, in two directions, and along the road from the village hall.

  It hadn’t come from the Parrett – the closer you were to the river, the safer you were. No one knew exactly where it had come from. Some people said the Environment Agency had released water because it feared that the Boltmore Wall, which the monks of Glastonbury Abbey had built to hold water on Curry Moor, was going to collapse, but others said it came from Clatworthy Reservoir, which was also under strain.

  The man who lived beside the church had left, and he had come back on 8 February to find a foot of water in the house, and a lot of ‘very cross people’. An aerial photograph showed the spire of the church rising above the flooded houses, and a small patch of dry land by the river, where it rises slightly. Car roofs and the top of a float that had been taken out of the sheds where it was kept in readiness for Bridgwater Carnival broke the surface. Fifteen or sixteen properties were saved, but the rest flooded, and still the water kept rising. ‘Beyond the village hall, it was above your armpits,’ the man said: ‘Here, it got just above the windowsill. There was eighteen inches in the church. The Environment Agency did a runner – no, that’s not fair,’ he added. ‘But they abandoned the village.’

  As if causing the flood by releasing the water and then disappearing was not enough, the Environment Agency then prolonged its effects, the man said, through its incompetence. Its employees didn’t know how to operate the machinery that kept the Levels dry. In 2013, the local council wanted to take out a noise abatement order because people living near Northmoor Pumping Station complained about the noise. The Environment Agency said it wouldn’t run it until it had to, so it ran it in the daytime, until the floods began, when it was turned on twenty-four hours a day. The noise and vibration were terrible, the man said, until an old chap who used to service the pumps offered to take a look at them. With a little love and attention, they ran ‘as sweet as a nut’.

  In some cases, the Environment Agency didn’t even know the machinery existed. There was a floodgate on the junction of the Tone and the Parrett that had been kept at two metres ‘forever and a day’, and it wasn’t until the height of the flood that someone remembered to open it. The man made it sound like they had tripped over themselves running upstairs, like a householder rushing to pull the plug in the bath after the kitchen ceiling has fallen in. It didn’t work, of course; the gate had seized up through lack of maintenance, and it took a day to lower it. The effects were immediately apparent – the water level in the man’s bungalow fell a foot within twenty-four hours.

  I was listening carefully, and yet, my doubts were growing again: I was finding it hard to sustain the sense of the perfidious nature of the Environment Agency which had seemed so strong when I stood in Thorney Street and felt a rush of rage at its secrecy and ineptitude. The Environment Agency seemed guilty of more failings than any single body could reasonably attain, for it was assiduous in doing harm and yet idle in other ways, simultaneously sinister and calculating and comically inept. I had begun to think that the stories we have always told ourselves weren’t relevant anymore: neither the Noah myth, which imagined the flood as a longed-for purging and rebirth, nor the legends of floods caused by incompetent or malevolent individuals could encompass the nature of a crisis generated by the day-to-day activities of billions of people. When it comes to climate change, we are all to blame. I believed that the flood was caused by the natural vagaries of the weather, aggravated by the pressure that humanity exerts on the planet, not government policies or bureaucratic mistakes. Yet even Glen Ward – who seemed unlikely to subscribe to conspiracy theories – said that Moorland had been cynically sacrificed to save a housing estate downstream, and I found it hard to discount the testimony of two elderly farmers who lived on the edge of the village, between the moor and the river.

  ~

  Mary and Brian Hutchings had met at a young farmers’ ball more than fifty years ago and had known straight away that they were meant to be together. They had lived at Battens Farm for forty years, and they had never seen anything like the winter flood of 2013–14 – nor had the old farmer down the road, they said, and he had been there even longer.

  There was often water in the fields, they told me, but usually you could still get out on the land. Some seasons were wetter than others, but that applies whether you are on top of the hill or in the Levels. Usually, the water was low, so the moor would act as a reserve to soak up rainfall, but, in the winter, the g
round had been sodden to begin with. English Nature and the RSPB believed – wrongly, Mary said – that birds liked water, and the Environment Agency had designated Northmoor as a lake, without telling anybody. ‘They’re playing God with other people’s property and it won’t be tolerated,’ she said.

  Yet the long-term failures were compounded by the decision to release the flood of water that engulfed their farm. They had never seen anything like it, Mr Hutchings said. ‘It was a vast area – miles of water. But we never heard a whisper officially to explain how it happened.’ They were in no doubt; there was only one way the water could have risen so quickly.

  ‘It was in the fields before Christmas, but it came here out of the blue,’ Mary said. ‘It came from nowhere. Obviously, it was let in, to come up that quickly.’

  ‘And it wasn’t just water, either,’ said her husband. He was a tall man, bony and angular, with work-hardened hands. He was dressed in green trousers and short-sleeved check shirt, for he had just come in from the fields.

  There had been wind to contend with as well; it lifted the roofs off the sheds and pushed over some of the outhouses. Yet it was the water that came up so fast, and stayed so long, that did the damage, and it was not a natural disaster: ‘It was caused by management neglect and a decision to flood us out.’