'Village road was like a river'

Sedgeberrow in the flooding (pic by Nick Hadley)

Alan Stanley, chairman of the Severn Area Rescue Association (SARA), was one of the volunteers called out on the night of 20 July 2007 when the heavy rain started falling.

He is based at the organisation's Wyre Forest station near Kidderminster, Worcestershire.

In the 15 years I've been doing this, I have never seen anything like that weekend.

As the rain started coming down heavier and heavier we got our first call out about mid-afternoon.

The ambulance service received a call about two elderly women who were quite seriously ill in Fladbury and needed to get to hospital.

But the water was too deep for the ambulance to get to them.

We arrived with the boat, got them into it and took them over to where the ambulance was standing.

Alan Stanley has been a volunteer with SARA for more than 15 years

Then - unusually - we received another call straight away.

We were asked to go to Sedgeberrow, and I had the route mapped out in my head, so we put on our blue lights and set off - it was about 4pm.

But nothing prepared us for the state the M5 would be in when we got there.

I knew we had to join at junction seven and go down to junction nine, but even from the slip road we could tell the motorway was flooded.

We managed to travel most of the way along the hard shoulder, and at parts of the motorway the water was too high for ordinary cars to pass but it meant our Land Rovers which were equipped could get through.

'Didn't feel anything'

When we finally got to Sedgeberrow the water levels were getting higher all the time.

I'm about 6ft 1in tall, and the water was up to the tops of my legs, and our trailer was actually floating behind the Land Rover.

RAF Sea King helicopters were hovering overhead, helping to pick up people from the windows of their bedrooms.

But we were trying to find one gentleman in his late 60s who had been lying in water for some time and was in urgent need of hospital treatment.

We went to his house, put him onto our stretcher and got him winched to safety. By now the water was several metres high.

I later heard he hadn't survived.

A boat rescue in Worcestershire (pic by Pip Mills Photography)

Crews worked for up to 25 hours at a time

When we got to the village's main road we found water running down as fast as you'd expect the Severn or the Teme to go.

When you're faced with an emergency like we had that night you go on auto-pilot.

We just had a job to do and we didn't feel the tiredness at that time.

To be honest, I didn't feel anything at that time.

We carried on working through the night.

I got home for a couple of hours at about 8am - about 25 hours after my shift had started. Our crew's rescue operation then started back up again soon on Saturday.

From Friday through to Sunday our boats rescued more than 200 people and 50 pets - the highest number of incidents in any three-day period in our 33-year history.

We lost two Land Rovers and a stretcher in the flooding, and we're still trying to replace all of them.

But a lot of people lost a lot more that weekend.