Harlow: Residents forced to leave homes in flash flooding

People have been forced to leave their homes after Essex was hit by flash flooding.

About 20 houses were flooded in the Harlow area during heavy rain on Tuesday evening.

Conservative district councillor Nicky Purse said water was "rolling off the land - it looked like a river".

Essex County Fire and Rescue Service said it received a high number of flooding related calls, particularly in Harlow.

Ms Purse, who is responsible for the environment at Harlow Council, said calls had been coming in "thick and fast" to the authority's out-of-hours team.

She said that while the council had done work to clear ditches recently, the "ground was sodden" and "water had nowhere to go".

"It just took the lowest route which unfortunately headed towards the houses in Potter Street and Old Harlow," she said.

"At points it was up to my knees and above, it looked like a river... it was just literally rolling off the land."

She added that the last time the area was badly affected was in 1987.

The council was waiting for a final figure of affected homes, but Ms Purse said she spoke to at least 15 residents who had been flooded and thought the total will be about 20-30 houses.

"My concern is helping these residents, contact us and we will do whatever we can to help you," she said.

Resident Martin Davies, who has lived in Elmbridge for about 35 years, said he had last seen similar flooding, where the "water came up to the same sort of height", about 34 years ago.

He said that on Tuesday, some people were stranded.

"They couldn't actually get back home because [the water] was just too deep and fairly fast-flowing," he said.

"It just seemed to be raining most of the evening and then we had hail battering down.

"I looked out of the window and saw brown water coming down and that means it was coming off the fields - so I thought I'd move my car.

"And it just kept coming."

Geoff Brant has lived in his house for 38 years and said torrential rain and thunderstorms came "out of nowhere".

"Suddenly the water level was beginning to rise along Churchgate St," he said.

"Then it rose substantially in a very short space [of time].

"A little bit of worry and panic set in but once the rain had stopped things began to subside very slowly.

"[It was] a scary moment but fingers crossed, the sun is shining and all is well now."

Neighbour Andy Thornton, who has lived in his home for 17 years, said that at about 19:00 BST he thought the rain looked "spectacular".

"But then for the first time ever the rain started coming up our pavement and I thought 'this is serious'," he said.

"I saw waves coming down the street, literally like a bore wave in a river and within about 10 minutes it was about 2ft in the middle of the road."

He said that eventually they had to stop cars trying to get through.

"Then it became a bit of a disaster zone, we were running around boarding up our houses - we were about 1cm from it flooding our house," he said.

"This is the beginning of a terrible future.

"Every cloud that comes off the Atlantic has now got a lot more rain in it because of global warming... it's going to happen again and again."

Fellow Conservative councillor in Harlow, Joel Charles, said he was "shocked" at the scale of the flooding in Churchgate Street in Old Harlow.

Mr Charles, who is responsible for community resilience, praised the emergency services and council teams for a rapid response and called for anyone in the area who had been affected and needed support to contact him.

Flooding also partly closed the M11 in both directions between junction seven for Chelmsford and junction 7A for Harlow, but all lanes were reopened by about 20:00 on Tuesday.

The Met Office had earlier issued a yellow weather warning of up to 20mm (0.8in) of rain within an hour for some areas on Tuesday.

It has issued a further yellow warning for today, predicting heavy showers and thunderstorms between 13:00 BST and 20:00 across the region.

Where heavy showers develop, 15mm (0.6) of rain could fall within an hour and possibly 25-30mm (0.9 - 1.1in) 2-3 hours where showers become slow moving, along with lightning and hail.

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