The Flood

Some of you may have heard on the news about the terrible flooding in my home city of Sheffield. Sheffield is not generally prone to flooding, except for a few specific areas. Usually much of the country can be underwater while we carry on as normal. On this occasion the rivers Don and Sheaf seem to have burst their banks. If you’ve been following the news reports it is likely you’ll have heard about Brightside Lane becoming a river and people having to be rescued from roofs by RAF helicopters. My mother just happens to work on Brightside Lane. She spent 3 hours trying to get to work and trying to contact them but eventually gave up and came home.

There was also a report of an explosion and toxic fumes from one of the industrial plants. Nevertheless, we could not pass up this opportunity to witness major national news to bring that news to you our loyal reader(s), even if this meant risking life and limb. Well, actually we had no intention of risking life or limb, and when we set off we had not heard about the deaths in this flood. A boy of 13 has been washed away, believed dead (a body has been recovered) and a man of 68 was caught and was killed as he tried to abandon his car.

It was a little disappointing when we got down there as the police were everywhere and were blocking off the routes to all the best areas. I don’t know how they decided where we could or could not go as there were heavily flooded roads ‘open’ while seemingly passable roads were closed. I complained repeatedly about how we used to live in a free country and that as a citizen I should be permitted to walk down any public street I want to walk down. Only not to the police. Because of the police restrictions, most of the pictures were taken using my camera’s full 10x optical zoom. The problem with this is that the slightest movement makes the photo a complete blur. I did manage to get one fairly clear one on full zoom when I used a handy traffic cone as a camera stand. The photos can be found on flickr here.

On our way home we heard that they had started sticking people in the Sheffield Arena and were giving out hot drinks. Obviously had we still been down there we would have popped in to get a cuppa and some more pics.

The last photo is the one from on the cone. This is in a different part of the city, the Wicker, nearer the city centre.

~ by yorksdevil on June 26, 2007.