Flood 10 Years On.
22nd June 2017
Cath Beatty’s Memories of the 2007 Flood
I remember driving to Aizlewood’s Mill on the morning of 25th June 2007 in the rain. Actually, ‘rain’ seems rather an understatement, it was chucking it down with all the ferocity of the middle of a storm. I looked at the weir as I crossed Lady’s Bridge and thought to myself “We’re going to flood today”
The Reception team and I watched the river with trepidation for the first hour or so and then decided that the inevitable was indeed coming and so started preparing for the water to come over the top of the riverbank. There are a number of tenants whose offices open out onto the front car park and we knew that they were in danger of being knee-deep in water by the end of the day and so we started helping them move to offices higher up in the building. Rare Creative Group were the first to be moved, into the conference room. A wonderful consequence of the design of Aizlewood’s Mill is that tenants can be moved to a new office on a different floor, with all their furniture and office equipment and can be back online within an hour or so.
The reception level is about a metre higher that the lower courtyard offices so after moving the important things from those lower rooms we started work on Reception and the offices at that level. By this time the river had started to come across Nursery Street so, with time not on our side, we started moving all the essential electrical equipment up onto pallets. By this time the tenants of the upper floors had realised what we were doing and many of them came down to lend us a hand. A team of IT engineers from Indigo 4 Systems came down and looked after the IT equipment and the rest of us moved essential paperwork and valuable artefacts.
It was about 1pm when the water started rising at a fast pace across the front car park and we realised it was time to start the process of evacuating the tenants. It has to be said that not many people on the front of the building were working any more, most of us were staring out of our windows wondering how far across the car park it was going to get. The water entered the courtyard offices and as there was nothing left there but carpet we let it come.
At this point we received a warning from South Yorkshire Fire and Rescue that we needed to start evacuating the building. There was a real possibility of an electrical fire should the flooding get into our cabling. The water was rising further and had now gone round the back of the building and tenants realised that they were going to have to act fast to get across to the car park and get their cars out. Little did anyone know at the time the future extent of the flood water and they should have left their cars in the safety of the car park and walked to the bus stop.
By 2pm the Reception team were ready to evacuate themselves, leaving one solitary tenant that was adamant he was staying put so, having alerted the emergency services to his location, we prepared ourselves to get wet.
Getting into the flood waters was truly horrible, cold, wet, dark and murky. You might think that walking through thigh-deep water is really not so bad, but once out of the safety of the courtyard car park it was fast moving and you are fully aware that there are kerbs somewhere underneath you and you don’t want to trip, and also the potential for missing man-hole covers which you could fall right down. There was no way of seeing the road so we used umbrellas as sticks to test the ground underneath us and linked arms to make sure no-one was swept away.
Our journey through the flood water was relatively short, just from the entrance of the building to the new roundabout at Derek Dooley Way, it was hard going and far more strenuous than we expected. We were relieved to reach the higher ground and start the long walk to my house, which was the closest of them all. We were all sitting in my living room with everyone having raided my wardrobe for dry clothes and shoes when the call from the Environment Agency came through to alert us of the flood – a bit too late!
I was so impressed the following morning when the tenant that had stayed overnight called me to say the water was gone and at about 6.30am the council had sent street sweepers down to clear all the debris from the road. Aizlewood’s Mill staff returned to work at 8.45 to find that the building was fully accessible and, to our huge relief the water had not reached the upper reception level and our office was unharmed. We still cannot believe that we opened for business at the usual time, albeit in wellies….
Not long after that day the river was cleared and the capacity increased significantly. We also were the beneficiaries of some intermediate flood defences which, although rather ugly, put our minds at ease. More recently those flood defences have been improved and made far more attractive and, along with the river level monitor at Lady’s Bridge, have given us a substantial level of protection and peace of mind. https://www.facebook.com/aizlewoods.mill/videos/1440775126009216/ http://www.aizlewoodsmill.co.uk/
