At about 3.15am on New Year’s Day, Caroline McClymont looked out of her bedroom window at the Sankey brook over the road. It looked a bit fuller than usual – to be expected, given the rain. “But there was nothing out of the ordinary,” McClymont said. “There was no indication it was going to flood.”
Within an hour, the whole street was under water. The home McClymont, a science lecturer, has owned with her husband Alan, a technician, for 31 years was filled with dirty water, higher than the kitchen countertops. It covered the sofas, washing machine, Christmas tree, everything on the ground floor. The neighbour’s car was submerged. “Everything is destroyed. Nothing could be saved,” McClymont said. “It’ll take six, seven months to get right again.
“It’s all those memories that you’ve collected for years and little, little things that you can’t replace. Nothing can be saved because it’s not just canal water, it’s sewage from the drains.”
The damage caused by the water – which has now receded – is extreme. But for McClymont and her neighbours the flooding was no surprise. For years they have been begging the local council and Environment Agency to improve defences in the area after a string of similar incidents, including floods in 2000, 2012, 2015 and a less severe one last month.
Their street in Haydock, St Helens, Merseyside, sits on low ground at the intersection of several waterways, the Sankey canal and two brooks, making it vulnerable. The issues were compounded during the new year flood when a water pump installed to quickly drain the area failed to activate – apparently due to a power outage at a United Utilities site, caused when the brook burst its banks.
But McClymont, who chairs the Blackbrook Flood Group, and runs a WhatsApp group with flood alerts for residents, says simple things that could lessen the risk have been neglected, including maintenance and dredging. Pipes to divert water when flows are high are left to fill with leaves, which she and Alan often rake away themselves whenever there’s heavy rain. A promised telemetry system to monitor water levels also has not been activated, with residents told it is still being calibrated.
“We’ve been fighting this for years,” she said. “People say, ‘Why don’t you just move?’ but I can’t afford to buy another house. No one’s going to buy it now it’s flooded. So we’re stuck here.”
A few doors down, Chris Moles, 60, a microbiologist who moved in last year, estimates she and her husband, hotel manager Adrian, 53, have lost possessions worth £30,000, including a car, kitchen goods, and a Macbook – as well as her microscope, fossils, rare books and an autograph from Leonard Nimoy, Mr Spock. “Obviously we’re alive. Everybody survived. But this is the worst it’s ever been,” she said. The couple also lost artwork by Adrian’s son Adam, who died with Addison’s disease five years ago, aged 15. “We would’ve lost everything else if we could’ve just kept that drawing he did,” Moles said.
Before they bought the house – their first – in April, they say they were promised that defences had been put in place and that the chance of flooding was “very slim”. “We were told they’d done this, that and the other, and that there was a very slim chance that it would flood. That didn’t turn out to be true,” she said.
“It’s heartbreaking. I can understand there’s tonnes of people out there that need help. There’s loads of places flooding. But when this has happened four, five times, you’d think by now they’d have done something. You pay council tax and you trust the people in charge to act in your best interests. And that’s just not happened. We literally have been left behind.”
Seven miles away in Bewsey, Warrington, residents near another stretch of the Sankey canal faced a similar fate. Vulnerable people living in supported housing were among the worst hit after a brook connected to the canal overflowed.
Among them was Barbara Gee, 61, who was cooking a New Year’s Day meal for her husband of 42 years, Alan, 67, when the water began pouring in. At about 3.30pm she had looked out the front window of her bungalow and seen the playing fields and road submerged.
It appeared to be encroaching. But after a flood in 2021, the couple had been given a flood barrier by the housing association that manages the property to attach to their front door.
Gee sent her daughter Liz a photo of the flooding, which had reached her doorstep. “OMG,” Liz replied, asking if the flood barrier was working. “For now,” Gee wrote back. But within half an hour the defence had been overwhelmed. She said water poured in not just through the front door but into every room: it spurted up through the drains in their bathroom, up through the toilet, and seeped in through the walls. “I was crying. Just burst into tears,” she said.
The couple have lost almost everything they own. On Friday, three days after the flood, their possessions were piled on their front lawn, contaminated or destroyed. The heap included a sofa, kitchen appliances, carpets and Gee’s electric scooter.
An alert system used to call for help in an emergency was broken. Their clothes and shoes were drenched. “We lost four bin bags’ worth of food from the freezer and everything is wet through,” Gee said.
They are stoic and grateful: they have family who can support them. And they are thankful to the local Warrington council for helping house them at a hotel while they try to sort things out. But they feel they and their neighbours have been neglected.
“The flood defences didn’t work. It needs to be a lot safer. We’ve had help with housing and food; I can’t knock them for that. They have been so good like that. They have tried to put up flood barriers, which haven’t worked. They have most probably thought that would help. But what’s the use having flood barriers if it’s going to come in through the walls?” Gee said. The clean-up will take months, with no money to help from contents insurance, which they could not afford to pay for “because of the cost of living”, and because after the last flood, “it is too expensive”.
Their neighbour Jeffrey Frain, 78, a lollipop man and former bus driver, whose possessions are piled outside his bungalow too, is in the same boat. “I believe it’s very expensive to get insurance here … When it flooded last time it brought the premiums up,” he said. He said flood barriers provided by the housing association were a “waste of space”.
“I put the flood barriers up but the water came in within minutes. I tried to brush it out but then I gave up,” he said. “It’s disastrous for me. I have a dog. I live on my own. I’m staying with one of my sons but I feel like a burden and I don’t like imposing.”
He added: “The flooding has been going on for years. It’s an ongoing thing and I don’t think they’ve done enough.”
Back in Haydock, the clean-up mission is in full swing. On Friday, volunteers came armed with cleaning supplies to scrub bathrooms and bundle destroyed possessions into skips.
The McClymonts – one of few households on the road that were able to secure insurance – have to keep everything until the assessors come out, so their driveway is covered with 20 black bags.
The worst thing, says Amy, 25, who lives with her stepdad Richard Coulburn and mother Joanne a few doors down, is that it feels this could have been prevented. “It’s traumatic,” says Amy. “We’re going to be traumatised every time it rains. We need this not to be a worry any more. I think it’s ridiculous. It happened like 10 years ago. How is it able to happen again?”
An Environment Agency spokesperson said: “Protecting communities is our top priority ... Environment Agency teams have been working around the clock over the new year, operating flood defences, issuing flood warnings and supporting those communities affected.
“More broadly, we are delivering a long-term funding programme of flood defences, investing over £1bn this year to scale up national resilience through building new and improving existing flood defences.”
Adam Hug, the Local Government Association’s environment spokesperson, said: “While councils will always do their best to ensure their areas are as resilient as possible, and when responding to severe weather prioritise efforts to ensure residents are safe, financial pressures on local government have an impact on their ability to address issues such as flooding as much as they’d like ...
“The nation is not sufficiently prepared [for the impacts of the changing climate], and central government must prioritise its work with local government to close this gap.”
Of the flooding in Haydock, United Utilities said: “A pumping station was flooded when the local brook burst its banks. This caused a power outage at our site. We have deployed a tanker to the area to manage our operations.”
