On Friday we had a major flood at work! I escaped through thigh deep water, and the water was still rising very quickly…

Here is a couple of videos showing the extent of the damage. The first video is one I took just after escaping, the second is of the water flowing into one of the basements which I believe held files of important documents…

The water was rising at an amazing rate… It was pouring inside as I left the building, and the level inside was rising quickly.

These pics were taken while I was deciding whether to leave, or just shelter inside. There was only a couple of inches of water inside at this stage, but as you can tell that wasn’t going to last. The water on the other side of the window was squeezing through the seal around the wiindow… how it never broke I have no idea!

By the end of the day there was around 18 inches of water in my building. Everything on the ground floor was completely ruined.

The best way to explain it is to visually show the speed the water was rising, so heres a couple of shots an hour apart…

The first was taken at 12:30 just as the lake was bursting its banks.

The next image was taken just under 1 hour later after I had evacuated out of the building.

The most important bit of this shot is the same life ring that is pictured above. Below is a crop of the photo that shows the life ring at full size…

Thankfully, our house at home was fine. Work is slowly getting back to normal, but the downstairs area (I’m on L1) feels like what I would expect after a nuclear bomb. Its not destroyed, but not intact either. It just feels cold and empty. It almost feels like the sort of scene you would expect in a ghost town… everything has just been left to the elements.

The area around our home is under a lot of water in parts. The Ford down by the pub normally has around 6 inches of water flowing through it. Friday night on our way home our Sat Nav sent us past the ford (ok, so it tried to send us through the ford) but there was 4 1/2 feet of water in it. By the time we went back Sat afternoon to get some pics, the 6 foot depth marker was nowhere to be seen!