Morpeth Floods
That was the view from our garden on 6th Sept. 2008.The river Wansbeck started rising in Morpeth in the morning but by the mid afternoon it had broken its banks and the flood defences until approx a thousand houses and a number of shops had up to a couple of feet of water inside. We saw cars in water up to the roof and wheelie bins, fences, awnings and huge tree trunks go down the river. We even saw a video on youtube of a car floating down the river.
We found crayfish swimming on flooded pavements and overheard someone saying they rescued a fish flapping by the side of the road!
There were plenty of people wandering around Morpeth taking photos and there were camera crews from the BBC and ITN. It seems like we saw everybody we knew on Sunday wandering around the streets of Morpeth!
I've uploaded some photos I took, with captions, to Google Photos so for details see there. The swimming pool and the library looked particularly tragic.
I have also uploaded some videos:
Our house is fine. As soon as the national news had finished loads of people rung and texted to check we were okay! Our house is about 20 feet above the highest level the flood came to. But we do have good views!
When the water was nearly back to normal (I'm writing this paragraph on Monday 9/8/2008) we took a plumb-line and measured the hight from the bottom of the footbridge we could see from our house that the water came just up to, down to the current water level which is about a foot above normal now. This came to 11 feet, so the total maximum flood was probably about 12 feet above normal river level.
One mystery is that we noticed large numbers of House Martins flying above the floodwaters. We wondered if they were catching insects knocked out of their usual places by the flood (not that we could see any insects). We even found a dead House Martin by our house the day after the flood.
Eventually the question was answered by someone posting to my YouTube video. The House Martins had nests under Oldgate Bridge, so they had been flushed out by the flood and were trying to get back to their nests.
More from the web:
News reports Videos:
Labels: Morpeth Flood
posted by Steve Locks at 12:43 pm
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