by James Meek
The localists made fair criticisms of the status quo in their reports. They complained, correctly, that the Environment Agency, away from coasts, only considered the dangers from fluvial, or river, flooding, and not from pluvial flooding, also known as flash or surface flooding, the kind directly caused by heavy rain.† They complain that local councils will not or cannot resist pressure from wealthy developers who would hem in or even build on flood-prone land. But this doesn’t entirely explain the consistent venom of localists towards public servants – almost an assumption of malice – compared to their relatively mild tone when talking of private servants, the representatives of the insurance companies, the big housebuilders and Severn Trent. Nor does it account for the assumption of complete lack of liability on the localists’ own part. ‘The biggest Confidence Trick by a British Government since the Second World War’ was how the Combined Flood Group described the government’s guidance for councils on building on flood plains. ‘Loss of the life [sic] comes third in the government’s priority.’
In Tewkesbury in general there is more hostility towards the government, the council and the Environment Agency for not stopping housebuilders than there is towards housebuilders for building houses, or buyers for buying them. When insurers raise their premiums, more blame is directed at the government for not spending enough on flood defences than at insurers for raising the premiums, or at people who choose to live in a flood-prone valley but don’t like paying extra for it. There is more hostility towards the Environment Agency for not warning Severn Trent that the Mythe works was on a flood plain (even though, in fact, it did) than towards Severn Trent for not being prepared for floods.
I was curious to know how Pavey felt towards Severn Trent, this highly profitable, private monopoly which had chosen not to provide a back-up in case Mythe failed, and whose subsequent mess he, unpaid, had voluntarily helped to cope with. He told me, but only because I asked. ‘I suppose I think it should be nationalised,’ he said. ‘I don’t think anybody should have any particular control over water. Everything on earth relies on water to live.’
Categories overlap, and Powell, the ex-mayor, besides being a localist, had been a public servant – he worked for the fire brigade – and was, when I met him, a private servant, working as an electrician for Severn Trent, based at Mythe. After the waterworks was flooded he toiled hard to help get it back on line. Severn Trent gave him £150 as a thank you. ‘I gave part of that money to the mayor’s charity fund,’ he said. ‘We were there, doing our job. Trying to get that works back and running so people could have clean water to drink and wash in, and that was our priority. Most of the people who worked there were out of water themselves.’
Since the flood, Severn Trent has spent £36 million on extra flood defences for Mythe and back-up pipelines against future failure. When asked why this hadn’t been done before, the company explained that the risk of Mythe failing was too low to justify the expense, and funds for investment were limited.
In July 2007, a few days after the floods arrived, with 350,000 people still cut off from the first necessity of life, Severn Trent held its annual general meeting. It announced profits of £325 million, and confirmed a dividend for shareholders of £143 million. Not long afterwards the company, with the consent of the water regulator Ofwat, announced that it wouldn’t be compensating customers: all would be charged as if they had had running water, even when they hadn’t. Colin Matthews, chief executive of Severn Trent at the time of the floods, left the company soon after this to head another private monopoly, BAA, arriving just as the baggage-handling chaos at BAA’s new Terminal 5 at Heathrow was peaking. In his last full year as head of Severn Trent, he was paid £1.2 million.
Like many Severn Trent workers, Ken Powell owned shares in the company. I asked him if he hadn’t felt bad taking the dividend when his fellow townsfolk’s taps were dry. ‘I don’t see why I should,’ he said. ‘I went in there and worked hard to give people back their water.’
The Severn is Britain’s longest river. It stretches 220 miles from its source in the Welsh hills. When the river makes trouble for Tewkesbury, it begins there, far to the north-west, with downpours that take days to swell the Severn downstream. There’s time to act, and usually there’s no need; the river bloats out into the meadows of the floodplain for a few days, one or other of the usual handful of houses gets flooded, and the waters recede. That, at any rate, is the standard script. But in July 2007 the source of the trouble was much closer, and hit much faster.
You can see the Cotswold Hills from Tewkesbury, low, amiable-looking bumps on the horizon a few miles to the east, separating the Severn and Thames valleys. Their highest point, Cleeve Hill, isn’t much more than three hundred metres off sea level. The Cotswolds are an escarpment. On the eastern side, the land rises gradually from the Thames valley, from the direction of Oxford; on the western side, however, looking towards Cheltenham, Gloucester and Tewkesbury, the hills fall away sharply. When it rains on the Cotswolds, the rivers that run off towards the Thames follow that gentler, slower course. The obscure rivers that take the Cotswold rain towards the Severn and the Avon, in contrast, deliver their load to Tewkesbury in as little as two hours.
Even before July came, 2007 had been a summer of floods, wetter than any since records began, 250 years ago. In Yorkshire and Humberside, 27,000 homes and businesses were flooded in June. In low-lying Hull, pumps failed to cope with the deluge, and a man trying to clear a storm drain died of hypothermia, surrounded by rescuers who couldn’t free his trapped leg. A man and a teenage boy were swept away by a flood torrent in Sheffield; the city was cut in half by floodwater. In Gloucestershire itself, schools and roads were closed, and homes and businesses flooded, but the most perilous impact for Tewkesbury of that earlier series of ferocious, unsummer-like storms was more subtle.
The Jurassic limestone of the Cotswolds had started May bone-dry – drier, in fact, than ever previously recorded. But by late July, the soil of the hills just east of Tewkesbury – Bredon, Alderton, Woolstone, Nottingham, Cleeve – was saturated. If more rain fell, the only place for it to go would be down to the valleys. And more rain did fall.
For weeks before 20 July, the weather had been behaving strangely over north-western Europe. If you were to look at a weather map for a regular July, it would show the jet stream – the ultra-fast wind, roaring at high altitude, that marks the boundary between cold polar air and warm tropical air – shooting north-east in a line between Iceland and the UK, across the Faroes. Britain would be comfortably on the mild side of the line, experiencing the benefits of the high-pressure zone centred on the Azores. Look at the same map for July 2007, however, and you see the jet stream take a sharp right turn halfway across the Atlantic and sweep through Brittany before heading across Central Europe into Poland. The whole of the British Isles was on the wrong, low-pressure side of the line. As if this wasn’t unpleasant enough, the air and sea temperatures still corresponded to summer. Warm air is capable of carrying more moisture before it falls as rain, leading to the short, intense, highly localised showers that cut short summer picnics and bring out the covers at Wimbledon. The combination couldn’t have been worse: saturated ground, the storminess of winter, and the moisture-laden air of summer.
On Thursday, 19 July, a damp, subtropical mass of air rolled from France into a depression over southern England and all but locked into place, like a ball in a cup. When the thick clouds in this air mass burst, they dumped extraordinary intensities of rain. It rained most ferociously on and around the Cotswolds. On Friday afternoon, Pershore, just north of Tewkesbury, was experiencing ten millimetres of rain an hour. Gloucestershire got two months’ worth of rain in twenty-four hours. Between Friday and Saturday the worst-hit hills of the Cotswolds had more than 350,000 tonnes of water dumped on them. Much of this water soon found its way west, seeking the Avon and Severn. Normally sleepy brooks and streams became savage torrents. The major obstacle between these suddenly angry watercourses – the
Carrant Brook, the Tirlebrook, the Little Fid and the Swilgate – and the two big rivers of the valley was the town of Tewkesbury, its 10,000 inhabitants and the Mythe waterworks.
Gloucestershire’s public servants – the councils, the health service, the police and fire service – had been well warned by the Environment Agency and the Met Office that there were likely to be problems with unusually heavy rain on the Friday, although nobody knew exactly where or when. The county’s emergency command system, known as Gold Command, opened up at its base in Quedgeley, south-west of Gloucester, on Friday morning, ready for the worst. The private servants knew too: Severn Trent says it issued an ‘emergency weather warning’ to its managers on Friday. But the company had locked itself into a mindset that precluded the possibility that its waterworks would flood.
Severn Trent periodically commissioned an engineering consultancy, Tynemarch, a spin-off company from Imperial College, to assess the risks to its treatment and supply network. By Severn Trent’s own admission, Tynemarch identified Mythe as a critical point of failure in the 1990s: if it shut down there was no back-up. But according to Severn Trent, Tynemarch’s most recent report, in 2004, assessed the risk of this happening through floods to be insignificant.
Short of burglary, there is no way to verify what the Tynemarch experts told Severn Trent in 2004, since Severn Trent refused to let me see the report on the basis that it was commercially confidential; and Severn Trent, as a private company, is exempt from the Freedom of Information Act. But here is what Martin Kane, Severn Trent’s director of customer relations, said in an interview with Radio Gloucestershire shortly after the floods: ‘The risk of flood defences being breached at the Mythe was – I think it was something like a one in a thousand chance of that happening, and the flood defences were considered to be absolutely secure, and we passed the 1947 floods without an issue, and we’ve had waterworks on the site for over a hundred years without any problem. So in terms of what we were looking for on the site, breaches of the flood defences were not part of the equation.’ He went on: ‘It was risk assessed, and the [assessment] was that it won’t happen. Therefore there wasn’t a plan for that.’
The Environment Agency takes a different view of the risk to Mythe. The agency’s publicly available flood-plain maps show large parts of the Mythe works covered by water in the event of a once in a hundred years flood – that is, a flood with a 1 per cent chance of happening in any given year. There are two ways of looking at that risk. Severn Trent’s way was: it hasn’t happened in a hundred years – actually, 137 years; the works opened in 1870 – so it’s not going to happen. The other way is: there’s a one in a hundred chance of it happening, and it hasn’t happened for 137 years, so a catastrophe is well overdue. Hardened gamblers, and statisticians working in the abstract, will tell you that the chance of a coin falling heads or tails in any one flip is exactly the same. But I doubt that even Colin Matthews would take his turn at Russian roulette with a light heart on the basis that a revolver with one round in the cylinder had been fired five times and not gone off once. Mathematically, over 137 years, the chance of at least one flood on a site likely to flood every hundred years is 75 per cent.
What makes Severn Trent’s relaxed attitude even more surprising is that the Mythe treatment works did come close to being catastrophically flooded in 1947 – floodwater entered basements – and in 2000, when staff got as far as shutting down key equipment. Then, the Severn peaked at 12.07 metres above sea level, only 45 centimetres below inundation point. One of the consequences of Severn Trent’s certainty that Mythe was floodproof is that the county’s emergency planners in Quedgeley had no inkling of how important it was. Severn Trent’s managers hadn’t taken part in emergency planning exercises, and when Gold Command convened at 9.45 a.m. that Friday, nobody from the water company was there, and nobody remarked on their absence.
The quickly swollen rivers shooting off the Cotswolds combined with flash floods in unexpected spots, many of them on higher ground, caused by the sheer local intensity of rain. The fire service took its first flood emergency call from a business in Chipping Campden at 11.24 a.m. Less than an hour later they were dealing with the first threat to life: a group trapped in a car by rising waters near the village of Adlestrop. By then the emergency services switchboards were lighting up with hundreds of calls. Minor and major roads across Gloucestershire were being snipped into unconnected sections by floodwater, just as the school holidays were beginning. The M5 and M50 motorways began to flood at lunchtime; by late afternoon both were closed, as were most of the roads that would normally have been used to bleed off traffic. All trains from London to Cheltenham, Gloucester, Bristol, Worcester and Birmingham were cancelled. Thousands of motorists and train passengers were stranded wherever they happened to be.
In Cheltenham, the River Chelt burst its banks by noon. More than a hundred roads were underwater by 4 p.m. Some residents were flooded for a second time in a month. In Chipping Campden, staff at a Ford dealership abandoned their premises when cars started to float out of the forecourt. In Gloucester, where most of the city centre was underwater, witnesses saw a motorist driving through a deeply flooded road crash into the back of a completely submerged van. In Bishops Cleeve, almost all roads were impassable. In Moreton-in-Marsh, manhole covers popped up like the lids on Smartie tubes and sewage gushed out.
In Tewkesbury, the small Cotswold rivers smashed up against roads and bridges. Following the lines of least resistance they, and then the rising Avon and Severn, encircled the town. Of the four thousand homes flooded in Gloucestershire in July, 1,500 were in Tewkesbury. At the height of the floods it was completely cut off by road. Aerial pictures showed Tewkesbury’s medieval abbey and its grounds seemingly afloat in a sea the colour of builder’s tea, like some fantastic Arthurian vessel attempting to moor at the half-drowned jetty of the town’s old high street.
As it happens, the Environment Agency’s main flood-warning control room for the west of England is on an industrial estate in Tewkesbury. But the town doesn’t use flood sirens, and at the time the agency’s archaic website used text, rather than maps, for its warnings. Residents got an automatic phone message from the agency warning of floods only if they’d signed up for one, and on average only two-fifths of people at risk did sign up. Besides, as Anthony Perry, flood-risk manager for Gloucestershire, explained, the key to the 2007 floods was the water pouring off the Cotswolds, and the agency didn’t give warnings for those small, nippy rivers. ‘The limitations are small watercourses, where they respond very quickly to flash flooding,’ he told me. ‘It’s technically very difficult to provide a flood-warning service to give a two-hour lead-in time. We don’t provide any flood warnings for the Swilgate or the Chelt at the moment and that’s something we want to do. But it’s difficult. Because of the speed. The rainfall that hits a rain gauge will be into the system and within the town within a few hours. It’s something we’re looking at now: is two hours better than nothing?’‡
The Environment Agency’s flood warning for Tewkesbury – ‘Flooding of homes and businesses is expected. Act now!’ – didn’t come until 6.53 p.m. on Friday. A severe flood warning – ‘Act now! Severe flooding is expected with extreme danger to life and property’ – followed at 5.45 a.m. on Saturday. By that time, many residents had already been flooded; others had been woken by the sound of rescue helicopters, and the first person in Tewkesbury to die as a result of the floods, nineteen-year-old Mitchell Taylor, had drowned while taking a short cut past the abbey on his way home from the pub. Passers-by heard him yelling for help – he couldn’t swim – and tried in vain, via mobile phone and the 999 centre, to guide a helicopter to him. His body was found a week later by an Italian hovercraft crew.
Overnight, the waters around Mythe rose with a speed that staggered the flood specialists. Perry showed me a chart plotting the level of the River Severn at the bridge next to the waterworks, sourced from an agency gauge. A red line charted the story of the floods of
winter 2000; from a high base the river rose gradually over two days, levelled off for a week, and then slowly sank back. The blue line showing what happened in July 2007 was quite different. The Severn was running relatively low before the rains. At 1.48 a.m. on Saturday, 21 July, the gauge readings began to shoot up almost vertically. In the next seven hours, the water rose 4.4 metres. Soon afterwards, with the water still rising, the gauge broke.
Severn Trent subscribes to the agency’s flood warnings and was monitoring them on Friday at its operations centre in Birmingham. But as the rivers swelled, the company and the Environment Agency, without realising it, weren’t understanding each other. Despite the agency’s severe flood warning at 5.45 a.m. on Saturday, Severn Trent still refused to believe its waterworks would flood. Throughout the day, the company called the agency, asking for updated predictions of what level the river would peak at. The agency obliged; and, since their predictions were lower than Severn Trent’s flood point of 12.52 metres, the company didn’t feel the need to warn anyone that they were at risk, or what the consequences would be. Severn Trent argues that it based its actions that Saturday on those agency predictions of the exact peak flood levels through the day. The Environment Agency maintains that the predictions were provided as a courtesy, and that what mattered was the earlier severe flood warning.
Perry showed me the agency’s flood map for Tewkesbury. ‘Half of the [waterworks] site is under water in a one in a hundred year flood,’ he said. ‘The map shows that. So where we issue a severe flood warning, it is to say half of that site will be flooded. We try to educate [Severn Trent] about what we are here to provide and we made clear to them that we are not here to provide millimetre-accurate warnings at Mythe. We issued a severe flood warning, which includes them, and we expect them to take action. After the 2000 flood, when Severn Trent came close to taking action, there’s a requirement for them to have a business continuity plan.’
