It's well-dressing weekend in Whaley Bridge and in an old workshop just off the high street four women are putting together the intricate boards which will make the up centrepiece of the festival. But despite the upcoming festivities the talk is of just how close the town came to catastrophe four years earlier.
"I got a phone call from my daughter," says Jill Malzard. "She said 'Get out of there'. The village was shutting down, all the roads were closed. The police came to my door and said you've got five minutes get out."
On July 31, 2019 cracks had started to appear in the huge wall of Toddbrook reservoir overlooking the town. There was, police said, a 'very real danger' the dam could collapse, causing disastrous flooding.
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Whaley Bridge's 6,500 residents were told to gather at a school, taking pets and medication with them. A major incident was declared.
Firefighters began pumping millions of gallons of water from the reservoir while RAF Chinook helicopters were drafted in to airlift hundreds of bags of aggregate onto the damaged slipway. Jill Malzard, who is in her mid 80s and has lived in Whaley Bridge for 35 years was one of 1,500 people whose homes were evacuated.
"I picked up stupid things I didn't need," she said. "I got my flannel but didn't take a nightie. I was just numb, but I knew if the dam went the whole house would be gone. The town would just have been swept away."
"It was a very uncomfortable situation," said Julie Sharman, Canal and River Trust chief operating officer. Ms Sharman arrived at the reservoir just moments after the fire brigade and stayed onsite until the early hours.
"We couldn't afford to be complacent, but with the mobilisation of the Chinooks and as soon as we got the water below 5m I knew that as long as it didn't rain again it would be OK."
But even with the town evacuated and RAF helicopters flying overhead, Mrs Malzard say the enormity of the situation didn't hit home until a community meeting a few days later. "A councillor got up and said 1,000 body bags were being stored in the football pavilion," she said. "Until then I don't think I comprehended the severity of it."
Thankfully the emergency measures worked and a disaster was averted. Within a week the dam was declared safe and the townspeople were allowed to return home.
A major independent report would later find 'poor design' and 'intermittent maintenance over the years' led to the failure. But a long-term solution was still needed.
Work on the £15m project started in the autumn and is expected to take around two years to complete. Led by the Canal and River Trust, which owns the reservoir, it will see around 1,000 concrete panels and 500 reinforced concrete pilings put in place to strengthen the dam and a new run-off channel created.
Millions of gallons of water have been pumped from the reservoir, leaving it at around 12m below its top level and less than 10 per cent of its normal capacity. That takes the pressure off the wall, allowing the work to be carried out.
The pumps put in place in 2019 are still there and are occasionally called upon if the water level starts to rise, transferring water into the River Goyt below. And having come so close to catastrophe, Ms Sharman says the repairs have been engineered in the hope of ensuring a similar emergency never happens again.
"It's designing something that will withstand a one in 10,000 year event, that will go over and above a 10,000 year event," she said. "It's actually called a 'biblical flood' in the industry. It's comforting that that's the standards it's being designed to."
Climate change has also been factored when calculating what the dam might have to withstand in the future, said project manager Tom Greenwood. "It's not only designed for the probable maximum flood, there's a climate change allowance on top of that too.
"We want to get the maximum resilience we can from a safety perspective. It's the biggest project by some distance that the Canal and River Trust is working on at the moment. We want to restore the reservoir back to safe working conditions, because ultimately it's for the community, it's for the people of Whaley Bridge."
Back in the town centre Steve Morris is walking his dog Max. Before 2019 their regular route took in the bridge over the dam wall.
"The day before I took a video of the water coming over the top of the wall," said Steve, 62. "It was just the sheer force of it."
Little did he know that for the next fortnight the small town on the edge of the Peak District would be at the centre of the country's attention. "People still talk about it now," he added.
"Before then no-one had heard of Whaley Bridge. Afterwards for a while we would get coachloads of tourists. Believe or not we actually got a coachload of Japanese tourists who turned one day."
But while the near-disaster put the town on the map, all concerned hope and pray it never happens again.
