2024-12-11
27 分钟Flooding in Tenbury Wells used to be a once in a generation event, now it’s happening increasingly frequently. Jessica Murray reports. Help support our independent journalism at theguardian.com/infocus
This is the Guardian today, why the flooding of one Midlands market town should spell a warning for the rest of the uk.
So Temporary Wells is this very picturesque market town in Worcestershire, surrounded by beautiful rolling hills and, and it's mainly known for its pump rooms.
It's got this stunning timber clad building which was used as a spa and bath house when these mineral springs and wells were discovered in the town in the 1800s.
And that's when the term wells was added onto the end of Temporary to give it the name that we, we know of it today.
The town has this very long history which is all very much connected to water.
This winter, the water has fallen, and on Tenbury Wells in October and again at the end of last month, when Storm Burke battered the UK with torrential rain and high winds, the quaint shops and red brick homes of this market town in the Midlands were flooded with murky brown water.
And Jessica Murray, who reports from the area for the Guardian, went there to see how people are coping.
So when I arrived after the floods, it was just a scene of complete chaos and devastation.
In the town centre, there was just mud caked over every surface you could think of.
The roads and the pavements were just really slippy and slick with this mud.
There was these big heavy industrial machines pumping water out of people's basements and it was really difficult to walk down the street because there's mountains and mountains of rubbish waiting to be picked up and taken away.
These kinds of scenes are becoming more common across the country this winter.
Tens of thousands of homes have lost power, trains have been cancelled and roads closed.
In a quick succession of storms, Ashley, Burt, Connell and Darragh.
People have been killed by falling trees and businesses destroyed in landslides and floods.
Across Wales, the Midlands and the north of England.
The UK's flood defences aren't coping.
And if the government doesn't start investing billions immediately, what's happened in Tenberry could be coming to your town too.
Emotions were really, really high when I was there.
Some of these shops were completely gutted, completely empty, and people were really finding it difficult to talk about what had happened and struggling to come to terms with it.