My night in the 2007 floods story .

It was a friday 20th july 2007 5.30pm night and raining , my truck a 45ft 32 tonne wagon and drag demountable was loaded and i was sipping a cuppa before settling in for the 250 odd mile night trunk to Hemel Hemsptead and Basingstoke .

The other drivers coming in to work were bringing storys of heavy rains and flooded roads , i finished my tea, bade them farewell and set off for my first drop At Hemel , two and half hours later after a horrendous m42/M1 journey in monsoon like rains i arrived at the Hemel depot .

i dropped the one box i had on the trailer picked up the empty and a half hour late made off in the rain along the M1/M25/M3 to Basingstoke .

Two hours later i had swapped boxes at Basingstoke , i had a break and began the journey home to Kidderminster .

The first serious flood i came across was on the A419 at Swindon , but after a little queuing and waved on by the police i ploughed my wagon through , the depth of the water surprised me , it was over the wheels, about three feet deep ,but ah ho a hundred yards later and i was back to warp speed with a clear dual track ahead , 33 miles later and the dual carriageway finished just before the air baloon pub and the long dark descent down Birdlip a very steep hill that meanders down from the tip of the cotswolds and on into Gloucester or the M5 whichever your chosen route.

The rain had been relentless all night , a constant downpour the likes of which i have seldom seen , at the bottom of Birdlip i noticed a line of queuing traffic at the slip road to the M5 south a minute later i saw the same thing on the slip road to the north , i pulled over and asked a driver what the hold up was , " motorways closed , its flooded !" was his response .

So with my knowledge of the local area i decided to carry on along the A417 into Gloucester , from Gloucester i could follow the A38 through Tewkesbury and on into Worcester and home ,

Gloucester was barriered off from traffic , the severn had flooded most roads and the route up the A38 was most definitely closed .

Plan c , was shoot up the golden valley into Cheltenham , up over the Cleeves past Bishops cleeve golf course , on Down into Evesham and home .

After queuing for a hour by the GCHQ and going nowhere i swung the wagon around in a side street and headed around the back of cheltenham and off up the cleeve road , magic i was on the way up to Bishops cleeve at about 1pm , be home in a couple of hours tops , so i thought !.
　

The Cleeves are a large range of hills sat the other side of the M5 from the Malverns , if you look carefully as you pass cheltenham on the M5 north , you will see the racecourse nestled snuggly at the bottom of the cleeves , they go for miles , look even more carefully and halway up a road straddles them from north to south 2 0r 300 feet up , this was the road i was on , in pouring rain , poor visibilty and a blooming great drop on my left.

I know the road well , i often used to travel it on my way to one of my favourite golf courses ( rose cloud ) when the weather was nice and i had a day off , tonight it was different , no other traffic had braved the hilly pass and a dark foreboding road greeted my headlights ,.
It was just past the golf course where sometimes we stop at a roadside spring and cool our heads That i had the first taste of the impending nightmare ,.
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The spring which was never ever more than a trickle that was culverted under the road was looming , my drivers window was half open , i had half a ear on the local news and in the distance i cold make out the long line of stationary traffic on the M5 300 feet below me and a mile or two to my left , my heart missed a beat and i broke out into a cold sweat as a thunderous roar to my right awoke me from my drivers trance , i looked at the area the rush of noise was coming from and just 15 feet from my window was a 20 foot high wall of cascading mud that was rushing down the Gulley that was usually a roadside spring ,it was more than the length of my truck wide and i was by now halfway past it , it was deafening and scary , as i drove past it my steering became light and the wagon seemed to struggle for grip , from pure instinct only ,i gunned it ,i got grip , i looked in the mirror as my trailer moved out to the left , i gunned it some more and the trailer straightened up behind me , The road over the culvert was collapsing , the weight of my truck and the continual pounding of thousand of gallons of muddy water had washed away the foundations below the road and i had just driven a empty lorry that weighed 18 tons over it , pheww close .

i plodded on along the A435 through the murky night cautiously , at a suitable layby i pulled over and lit a fag , my hands shook as i offered the lighter to the ciggy , in the next few days newspapers showed pictures of that culvert , it was a gaping 80 foot hole where a road once was .

I knew a short cut a good country lane i had used many a time in good weather and slipped off down it hoping this would claw back some of my journey time.
A mile or so later i came to a halt behind a Argos lorry , i jumped out and asked the driver , what was the hold up , he pointed to a quarter mile stretch fo flooded road and said " that " a full blown river had coursed its way across the fields and was now in full flow along the lane , cars were being swept away as though they were made of balsa wood , there was no way i could drive through that .

No choice but to reverse the mile or so back down the lane , i did it depspite the battering rain , lack of light and the odd bit of oncoming traffic, i eventually reversed into a farmers gate , turned around and carried on towards Evesham on the more usual route .

Eventually i reached the A46 Tewkesbury to Evesham main route , by now i had succesfully steered my truck through countless window high floods , passed hundreds of abandoned cars and stranded motorists , seen every pub along the way crammed with cars and wet disheveled drivers huddled in them seeking shelter from the relentless rain.
500 yards up the A46 i met the mother of all flooded roads , a mile of brown 4ft deep water barred my way on and up into Evesham , i stopped weighed up the situ and decided to go for it.

The water was at times above the bottom of my passenger window ,but the exhaust fed out above the cab so i pressed on , halfway through a lorry was coming the other way , he slowed and asked if the M5 was open , to my utter astonishement it was a schoolpal of mine who had also worked on the same haulage firm as me in my early days , we shook hands from window to window , wished each other luck and i have not seen him since - he's not lost or anything , i just have'nt seen him !.

i made it to Evesham by 04.30 , went into a 24 hour tesco for some snacks and had another break , i spoke to local policeman while on my break , he said the new raised section of road to Stratford was open .

le="font-size: 11empx;"> I decided this route would be my way home , in the dawn light the raised section of road revealed the full extent of the nights disaster ,on both sides of the road and as far as the eye could see was mile upon mile of flooded fields , it was like a disaster scene in a foreign land , dead animals were everywhere , houses were flooded up to their roof tops and the brown sea extended beyond the horizon , one nights rain had caused this , the Avon and the severn were unable to cope , the overflow extended out from them engulfing anything in its way , caravans , animals homes and cars - devastation.

i eventually arrived back in our yard at 9 am , there was a brown tidemark around my lorry just below the windscreen , vegetation hung from every possible hold on the truck and it took me four hours of hard scrubbing to get it clean .

No other driver had left the yard that night , just a half hour after i had gone the boss phoned in and called off all night runs , i had my phone off, that night friday the 20th of july 2007 2 months rain fell in 14 hours and i drove nearly 300 miles in it !!

The other guys still talk about my epic night and i often wonder why i did'nt just pull over turn on my night heater and go to sleep in the bunk -- sometimes you just have to go for it .

Tewkesbury the day after -


Do you have a horrible journey tale ?.

 

soz horts :-[

quality not quantity

 

great read

 

Tiny pie's journey reminded me of this

 

Nice one moons , people sat at home seeing it on the news or hearing it on the raio don't quite get how lonely and disorientating these situations are , well done for getting home

 

thats an excellent story Malc, I remember those floods well! (it brought us lots of work in from a Gloucester based company who got flooded)