Trapped in her home on the banks of the River Severn in Shrewsbury, Siobhan Connor said this was the 17th time she had been flooded in 14 years – and it was only becoming more frequent.
“If you look at all the forecasts, this is going to become an annual or biannual occurrence,” Connor said from her first-floor window, as flood water filled the ground floor up to waist height. “We’ve had four major floods here in two years, and they’re now at record level.”
Residents of Shrewsbury said they were hit by the worst flooding in 20 years this week as they criticised authorities for decades of inaction. After being flooded for three consecutive years, many in the town said they feared the climate crisis was making major flood events more frequent while the government was doing little to help.
“River levels today are close to the 2000 record, and 22 years later what have they done?” said Connor. Forecasters had anticipated that the river level at Welsh Bridge in Shrewsbury could surpass the record 5.25 metres measured in 2000, but at its peak on Tuesday morning it was just under at 5.15 metres.
Despite having installed state-of-the-art flood defences and elevated her home, Connor feared the damage this time round would be extensive. “We’ll have to get in massive industrial dehumidifiers which will probably drain about 10 litres of water a day for at least a month. And we all know energy bills are going up in a couple of months. There’s so little government support, it’s expensive,” she said.
She said it was a combination of housebuilding on floodplains and climate change that were pushing water levels ever higher, and felt action by the Environment Agency was ineffective. “There’s ways of mitigating flooding that could have been done with the right planning years ago. There’s nothing now we didn’t already know 20 years ago,” she said.
Down the road, Louise Turner was helping to pump water out of the basement of her family’s business, the Abbots Mead hotel, which they have run since 1994.
“I haven’t seen it this bad in years, since 2000 probably. This is horrendous this time. Surely it shouldn’t be happening in this day and age,” she said. “Usually it comes in a little bit, and our pumps kick in. This time the basement has flooded, including one of our family rooms, and the restaurant. It’s impossible to see the scale of the damage until it goes down, but it will be a lot.”
She added: “It will be in the news for a couple of days and then people will forget about it until the next time round. It happens continuously. Something needs to change.”
On Tuesday Shrewsbury’s Conservative MP, Daniel Kawczynski, wrote to the prime minister asking him to visit the area to witness the “extent of the devastation … to homes and businesses”.
Lezley Picton, the Conservative leader of Shropshire council, said local authorities were working extensively with the EA on solutions to stem the flow upstream, but admitted a quicker fix was needed. “We need short-term as well as long-term solutions, because businesses and people’s homes can’t go on like this. It’s heartbreaking, for some of the businesses this is the third time in three years they’ve flooded,” she said. “I’d like to see the government and the EA have some resolution to get this sorted sooner rather than later, because it’s not just us who are affected.”
Downstream in Ironbridge, where the EA evacuated people from their homes and issued a severe threat to life flood warning, residents were preparing for the river to potentially overcome flood barriers on Tuesday evening.
Peter Andrews, an ice-cream vendor, had decided to stay put in his cottage on the banks of the river and was relying on a water pump and thick metal boards to keep the waters at bay.
“This is the third year running we’ve been flooded, so I’m getting used to it now. But prior to that it was around 2000 we had floods. It’s got to be down to global warming and all these freaky storms,” he said. “But what can you do? I would like to see more action to improve the situation, but I don’t know what the answer is.”
