by Edward Platt
Edward agreed: ‘We are very lucky to live here.’
~
I had only met one other person who was so unconcerned by the prospect of being flooded, or its effects when it happened. Geoff Parkin, who lived beside the River Wansbeck, in the Northumberland town of Morpeth, was even better qualified than Mr Raikes to assess the risks to his home. He was a senior lecturer in hydrology and water resources at Newcastle University, so when he opposed the Environment Agency’s plan to build a flood wall on the bank behind his house – eight years before Morpeth was engulfed by the worst flood to hit the town for nearly fifty years – he did so from an unusually well-informed perspective. It was a question of balancing amenity and risk, he told me when I met him at his office in Newcastle. He knew that some people wanted defences at all costs – and he understood why they might – but other people bought their houses because they were close to the river, and they were prepared to accept the risk they might flood. ‘So, when the Environment Agency came along and said, “We have to protect you,” people refused. On balance, they said, “No, you are not going to build a wall across the top end of town.”’
It was only a temporary reprieve – when I went to Morpeth in March 2013, five months after it had flooded for the second time in four years, they were cutting down trees on the banks in High Stanners, the low-lying area in the western end of town, to make way for the defences that Geoff Parkin and others had initially resisted.
It was a bitterly cold day. It had been cold when I left London, and I had seen it getting colder as we travelled north, as the standing water in the fields outside York gave way to a dusting of snow on the corduroy grooves in the fields near Durham. Even Alan Bell, the chairman of the local flood group, who met me at the station, conceded that it was ‘cool out’. In typical Geordie style, he was wearing jeans, an open-necked shirt and a leather jacket, though he admitted that he didn’t get out much. He preferred driving to walking, and, before we had left the station, he had begun talking about his Saab Aero, which ‘beat the shit out of a GTi.’ I had guessed he was a smoker when I spoke to him on the phone, and his wheeze was more pronounced in person. He drove me round town, pointing out the houses that had flooded in 2008, and showing me how the water had moulded itself to the contours of the land, so it reached the ceiling in some houses, but left other streets untouched. When we got to High Stanners, Bell stood, shivering, in the shelter of the trees, while I walked along the edge of the peat-brown river.
In most places, the water was a few feet below the level of the banks, though the way it coiled round the trunks of the riverside trees implied that it was higher than usual. In some places, the dark brown water slowed and circled, like peaty sludge, stirred by hidden currents, but in other places, it careered forwards, streaked with flecks of white foam. There were platforms under the trees that might have been for swimming or diving – if not for people, then for dogs, who were out in force.
I had left Morpeth when I was seven years old; I didn’t remember much about the town, beyond home and school, but I remembered the way the village was built around its river, houses clustering on the low-lying banks, or arranging themselves on the hill for the best views of its snaking curves. It was easy to see why people valued the river – and yet those who wanted it to remain a living presence in the town, open and unconstrained, were losing out to those who feared its destructive force. High Stanners had become a lake in 2008 and 2012, as the swollen river rose from its channels and spread out across the banks towards the houses in the trees, where the land began to slope uphill – and, once it was under water, there was no way out, except by a muddy, unfenced path that climbed steeply through the woods. The work would alter the character of High Stanners and the other areas adjoining the Wansbeck River, because it would be ‘canalized’, or enclosed behind flood walls, as it was several hundred metres downstream.
~
The Wansbeck was quiet in the first half of the twentieth century, but, in 1963, it burst its banks in the centre of Morpeth. A butcher was rescued with a boathook after he fell into water eight feet (two and a half metres) deep, telephones at the police station failed when the electricity supply went down and abandoned vehicles blocked the road. The RAF helped with the clean-up. Hot-air machines were brought in to dry the houses. Afterwards, walls were built to contain the river in the centre of town. Yet, when Morpeth flooded again, in October 1967, two burns spilled out behind the walls, flooding houses and the lemonade factory in the riverside street called Goose Hill – site of the school of the same name, where I had learnt to read and write. Defences failed in the centre of town, and the library flooded. The staff saved books by carrying them upstairs. More work was done: the river channel was widened, walls and embankments were built, and the burns were modified to ensure they could still discharge into the Wansbeck when the river was high.
The work ‘greatly diminished the natural amenity of the riverside to the town,’ writes David Archer, a colleague of Geoff Parkin’s at Newcastle University, in an evocative account of Northumbria’s rivers called Land of Singing Waters, yet it also reduced the Wansbeck’s propensity to flood. Alan Bell had grown up in a part of Morpeth that hadn’t flooded in 1963, but he now lived behind Goose Hill, behind the new defences. His three children, who had gone to Goose Hill primary school after I had left, all remembered being shown a picture of a boat in the street outside the gates. The fear of the river did not entirely go away, even when the defences were built: people used to gather at the end of the Bells’ road to check its height. Yet no one really thought it would overtop again, until Saturday, 6 September 2008, when Morpeth was struck by a storm of rare intensity.
~
It started raining on Friday afternoon, and it was still raining on Saturday morning. ‘In all my life, I have never witnessed rain like I did that day,’ said Simon Davies, an old schoolfriend of mine who had got in touch through Facebook, forty years after we last met. I was pleased to hear from him. I sent him a copy of a photograph taken at my sixth or seventh birthday party, and Simon replied, identifying himself as the ‘devilishly handsome dude in the tank top, next to your mam’. He had moved out of Morpeth in 2006, two years before the flood of September 2008, which was just as well, for the area where he had lived was inundated.
On the morning of Saturday, 6 September, Alan Bell walked to the end of the road several times to look at the river. It was high – the Mitford gauging station outside town would record its highest ever level – but the first flood came from the same source as in 1967. At ten o’clock, a culvert on the Church Burn behind Alan Bell’s house blew a cover, and, within an hour, there was four inches (ten centimetres) of water in Goose Hill. Mr Bell went out to get a paper and found it hard to get through it. ‘If it’s static, it’s like a pond,’ he said. ‘But six inches of running water is enough to knock you over.’
Driving through it was difficult as well, even with a two-litre engine. His daughter, who was coming back from Newcastle, got to the entrance to Goose Hill at midday, and turned back. She went to her grandmother’s house and Alan picked her up. ‘You keep it in first gear and keep the revs high, and if it conks out, you use the starter motor,’ he told me, but he admitted he didn’t enjoy driving in those conditions. ‘I thought, I’m not going to do that again.’ The houses opposite were beginning to flood, and he went down the street with a tape measure, working out how high it would need to get before it came inside.
It was still raining. More than three times the long-term average rainfall for the whole month would fall on the town in less than forty-eight hours. Simon Davies went back into town to help his father, who lived at the bottom of King’s Avenue, the street where we had lived, and together they filled fertilizer sacks with soil to act as sandbags. It was raining so hard that they couldn’t see each other, though they were facing one another: ‘he holding the sack and me shovelling,’ he told me by email.
At four o’clock, Alan Bell decided to take the two younger children
to his mother’s, leaving via the footpath at the end of the lane, which was now the only exit. His wife took their eldest daughter to her boyfriend’s house. At four thirty p.m., the Wansbeck overtopped the supposedly impregnable defences at Goose Hill, and by the time Alan’s wife got back, the house had flooded. Mr Bell put bags of sand on the airbricks and fitted boards across the front door, but it didn’t make any difference. ‘You can’t stop it,’ he said. ‘It comes through the floorboards. You’re running around, trying to lift things – you put tellies on seats, things like that. But there are so many things you don’t think about.’
Since the house stood at the extreme point of the flood, and on a slight rise, they had two inches of water in the ground floor, but, in High Stanners, the water was much deeper. Paul Gillie, who owns a B & B beside the bridge, which becomes a dam when the Wansbeck is high and can’t get through its arches, was fighting a tide six feet (1.8 metres) deep. He had started bailing out the sewage-tainted water that was spilling from the gutters and washing through the ground floor in the morning, hoping that the Wansbeck would subside before it burst its banks, as the Environment Agency had said it would. But then there was a sudden surge and it came through the door. ‘It’s like tar – as black as the ace of spades,’ he said. ‘And the smell is disgusting.’ To begin with, he was undeterred. ‘The family had all gone, and it was a bit of an adventure – the adrenaline had started flowing.’
At four thirty p.m., he gave up trying to save the B & B and went to a friend’s house. He helped her bail water and move furniture upstairs. He looked out and saw an RAF Sea King hovering over houses on the other side of Morpeth; he said it felt ‘like a third world town’. Meanwhile, Simon Davies, who was going home, met ‘a refugee column’ of cars and people on the road. He was one of the last people to leave. As he came up the main street by Telford Bridge, there were torrents of water swirling around the foot of St George’s church. He watched a car come up the street from the library; the water reached the bottom of its doors.
In Goose Hill, Alan Bell’s neighbours were wandering around with plastic bags full of possessions, not knowing where to go. The electrics tripped soon after. Mr Bell had run out of cigarettes and tried to go and get some. He went out the back way, but he couldn’t get across the footbridge into town, so he went home again. At eight o’clock, he looked out of the kitchen and saw a lifeboat going down the alley. ‘That’s when you know it’s deep,’ he said. Yet, once the water started draining, it went down very quickly; by midnight, it was possible to walk along the street at the back of the house without wellies.
~
As usual, the effects of the flood took much longer to subside. People were nervous, Alan Bell said, and it was plain that he was, as well. Whenever it rained and the river began to rise, he would start to worry – not only about his own house, but about other people’s too. Since he worked from home, he was able to go to the many meetings called in the aftermath of the flood of 2008, and he became chair of the local flood group, which monitored the authorities’ response when the river began to rise, and campaigned for improved defences.
Paul Gillie had known the B & B was at risk of flooding when he bought it, but he’d been reassured that there was a plan to build storage upstream. Yet the work hadn’t started by 2008. It was finally approved in February 2012, but, before it began, the Wansbeck burst its banks and his painstakingly restored B & B flooded again.
‘It’s just anger – that’s all I’ve felt since then,’ he told me, as we sat in the hall that was being stripped out for the second time in four years. It was open to regulars, though his family had not moved back in yet. ‘Anger and disappointment. Feeling a bit useless as well – the effect it has on your family life is quite profound. We all went back in. The first time we were flooded out, I just saw it as an inconvenience, because it was my business and we just happened to live here. Since then, it has become our home.’ The cost of the repairs would be less than in 2008, but the strain had been worse; he wasn’t sure how he had managed. ‘Last time, I had a lot more help, but I’m working eighteen-hour days, and I’m exhausted.’
I asked him what he thought of the Environment Agency, and he sighed. ‘I’ve got nothing good to say about them,’ he said, though he did not like hearing himself complain. ‘That’s probably a little bit unfair,’ he added. ‘They’ve got to build flood defences everywhere – they’ve got to prioritize. But why they wouldn’t say Morpeth was a priority, I don’t understand. When it floods here, it’s not just three or four houses that are affected.’
Geoff Parkin took a much more dispassionate view. He had never regretted the decision to refuse the defences. In fact, he had never even asked himself whether they would have helped in either of the floods. He assumed the wall would have been ‘overtopped’ in 2008, for it was planned to national specifications, which were inadequate for the scale of the storm that struck Morpeth that day, but he had never run the simulations to see where the water might have gone. ‘I knew this point, but talking it through makes it a bit more obvious,’ he said. ‘It’s a good point, actually. That would be quite interesting, because we could model that, which I hadn’t thought of doing – we’ll do that now. It is academic, now, because things have moved on, but in terms of decision making . . . that’s a thought.’
I was fascinated to discover that he had never considered the idea. Across the country, people were furious with the Environment Agency for failing to build defences to protect them, and yet Geoff Parkin had not only done his best to stop the wall being built, he had never even considered whether it might have helped. Yet the flood had made an impression on him in other ways. He particularly remembered the sound the river made as it poured past his door. The contours of the land meant that, once it had burst out of its bank, upstream, it couldn’t get back in, and it backed up until it was higher in the road than it was in the river. ‘You open the door and it’s like a waterfall, it’s like the Niagara Falls going past.’
He had been moving possessions upstairs and watching the river rise in the back garden when his wife shouted that it was coming in the front door. Yet he was not concerned by any of the other elements of the flood that upset so many people: he wasn’t upset by having water in the house, and he dismissed the process of ‘recovery’ with a shrug. The only part of it that he disliked was the effect it had on relations with his neighbours, particularly in the ‘terrible scramble’ that ensued the next day, when everyone who had been flooded had to find somewhere else to live. ‘Everyone was walking up the high street with a £500 deposit, in cash, in their hands, and if you found a house in Morpeth, you said, “Yeah, we’ll have it, done.” I knew we were competing with other people up the street for the same house. That was horrendous.’
Conversely, he valued the community spirit that the clean-up inspired. For three years, he organized a Christmas party at the rugby club just up the road, because their neighbourhood had emptied as people refitted their homes. ‘It was like a diaspora – people had scattered far and wide, so I organized this party and everybody came back. Virtually the whole street came in the first year, which was really good. I organized one the following year, which was reasonably good, and, in the third year, you could see that people were going back into their normal silos of existence, which was a shame.’
The community spirit was beginning to revive again, as the street united in opposition to the Environment Agency’s plan to build what Geoff Parkin called ‘this damn wall’ across the back of their gardens. They wouldn’t have to leave their houses, but they wouldn’t be able to get into their gardens for nine months – and, for gardeners, that is not a trivial consideration, he said. He noted that he and his wife had been out of their house for seven months after the flood, which was more or less as long as it would have taken the Environment Agency to build the defences, and he seemed to think that being barred from the garden would have been as great an inconvenience as the flood.
Yet the flood had had at least on
e lasting effect on him, for it had changed the nature of his work. He used to specialize in ground water and water resources, but now he was running a ‘citizen science’ project that gathered eyewitness reports of downpours and flash floods, like the Toon Monsoon that had struck Newcastle in June 2012. He tried to ‘get out and about’ during ‘flood events’, gathering evidence that would allow him to reconstruct what happened and design ‘alleviation schemes’. He had written a report on the Morpeth flood of 2008. Information Gathering for Dynamic Flood Reconstruction set out to identify ‘flood generation mechanisms’ – such as ‘out-of-bank fluvial flooding’, or flooding which was caused by the river, ‘localised pluvial flooding’, which was caused by the rain, backflow through urban drainage networks and overtopping of flood defences – and to use them to improve ‘evacuation and emergency access . . . and flood protection measures.’
He was keen to make the point that flood defences might not help, no matter how well they are designed – in fact, they might make things worse, by creating a false sense of security. If a river bursts its banks in an undefended town, and rises slowly through the streets, there is time to react, but if a weight of water builds up behind a flood wall that gives way, or is suddenly overtopped, the town it was supposed to be protecting might be engulfed. There was such a ‘tipping-point effect’ in Low Stanners in 2008: once the flood defences were overtopped, the water rose so fast that puddles in the road became a flood that filled houses to the ceiling.
It wasn’t easy conveying the nature of the risk, for the statistics were ‘non-stationary’. The floods that struck Morpeth in 1963, 2008 and 2012 were classified as one-in-a-hundred-year events, which also meant they had a one-in-a-hundred chance of occurring in any given year, but, in fact, they were harder to read than that. You can’t assess the probability of a flood occurring in any given time span, because the climate is changing all the time, and the odds are changing with it. Hence, the decision to increase the protection from one in a hundred years to one in fifty in Morpeth was political, driven by the perception that the risks are increasing. ‘What probably matters to people is a lifetime’s length, whether they think it’s going to happen once in their lifetime, compared to once every five years,’ Geoff Parkin said. ‘Whether it’s going to be one in a hundred years or one in a hundred and fifty years doesn’t matter. Is it likely to happen lots of times within your lifetime or not? That’s the sort of consciousness of risk that people take on board.’