Flash floods land Cornish village with £1m repair bill

♦ Flash flooding caused more than £1million worth of damage to a Cornish village following torrential downpours.

In scenes similar to the Boscastle flood of August 2004, the equivalent of “200 Olympic-sized swimming pools” rained down on the rural village of Coverack on Tuesday afternoon.

As a clean-up was launched yesterday, council leaders promised that money will be “no problem” in the mission to repair the 50 or more properties damaged in the storm.

Meanwhile, downpours continued to wreak havoc across the country, with residents in Royal Tunbridge Wells forced to evacuate their homes after they became submerged in 3ft of water. In Cambridgeshire, adverse weather conditions caused disruption for commuters and also for power lines, with police suffering an outage on the non-emergency 101 service.

Families in Essex were forced to flee from four semi-detached houses which caught fire when lightning struck a TV aerial.

Lightning appears to strike the ruins of Brighton’s West Pier during last night’s electrical storm off the south coast. Others places were affected by lightning strikes and severe floods