I have experience of flooding and it is never too soon to be prepared, there are so many Doubting Thomas's, ignore the fact that authorities are working to make you aware of the dangers then you could perhaps place a Notice outside your home that nobody should put themselves in danger trying to help you as you disbelieve it is going to happen.
I was involved in rescue of people and property, and and the protection for reoccurence at the next tide in 12 hours.
Having been so involved I later wrote a book of the disaster;
This is the opening chapter.
Sheerness Floods 1978
The noise of the storm was getting worse so, I turned up the volume on my television to distance myself from the turbulence outside.
My three cats, each with their ears cupped like radar scanners searching for danger in the unaccustomed noise sat , two in an armchair and one on the settee, their now favourite places in our new home. We had not long moved to this bungalow on the top of the hill.
Three days previously I had joined the Library and browsed through all the books I could about the local coastline and tides.
I noticed that the sea defences had been made higher with some of the sea wall dwarfing the two storey houses across on the lower part of the road.
I was a Townie, just arrived from the “Smoke”, so I enquired from residents about the urgency of the new sea wall. No one seemed to know when it would be needed to protect the low parts of the island.
The safety of the island , was not a thing that seemed to bother them. The general attitude was not of interest.
This prompted me into getting information of this pending flood. The books I found all seemed to point to the night of Wednesday, 11th January . “This is that night” I thought, “But I must be wrong, because no one cares.”
I went to bed disbelieving, and tried to sleep. My bed seemed to move with the wind, and the new roof, tiled only five months previously, seemed to be lifting and about to come off, or would it fall in on my head as I lay there?
Wind blowing the letterbox flap, caused me to get up and put a strip of Sellotape across it to stop the noise. I opened the front door to receive the door mat and two milk bottles into the hallway. I forced the door shut and locked out the intruding wind before returning to bed.
The next morning I rose at six thirty as usual, after two mugs of tea, a quick wash, and feeding the cats, I was off to Sheerness to work.
I started my little Austin Van, and pulled up the steep slope to the lane, down this
unmade road into the new housing estate, I turned out of the estate, down towards the sea wall, where I saw the moon shining brightly and reflecting in the water that was blocking the road.
“It had happened”, the water was across the road, and half way up the house to my left that had just changed ownership, “What a shame!”
I had stopped a few feet from the edge of the flood water, I could not go this way, I climbed out of my van in time to stop two following cars from overtaking me into the water, I signalled them to take the other road then reversed and followed them.
The wheels were bumping over large stones , and soon I was driving in wet sand, afraid I was going to get stuck. I passed the Warden Bay Pub, on my left a large tree root floated towards me. Cars were abandoned all the way up the road, in a foot or so of water. Leaning against a car were pieces from a Wooden toilet hut , blown from the Holiday Camp across the field, passing a Caravan Camp I saw the roofs appearing just above the water, one good thing was that this was the closed season, and no one was in those Caravans.
As I followed the sea wall into Sheerness, the road was scattered, with timber floating, bits of smashed boats, seaweed , plastic containers of all shapes and sizes, and hundreds of plastic refuse bags, the going was slow as I had to pick my way through the debris, I was going through water a foot deep, and it was coming in around my feet, my legs were now soaked as the water came up to the seat.
The first shops I came to had a lot of water outside, it lapped around the two telephone boxes outside the Post Office, passing through the flooded Broadway, I turned in to Trinity Road and parked outside the Council Depot where I worked, as I walked through the few inches of water here, there was sea weed left as the water started to drain away.
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