Family rescued from flood through top floor window
V BEING BUNDLED out of the top floor window of their AirBnB rental into a waiting boat was how Jessica Falk Perlman unexpectedly ended a long weekend celebrating her mother’s birthday.
The 29-year-old, her husband, parents and her brother — who flew in from Canada — spent a nervous night and morning awaiting rescue from a house in the Welsh town of Crickhowell, after water oozed in and eventually reached the ceiling of the ground floor.
They had gone to celebrate Ms Perlman’s mother’s 60th birthday, arriving on Thursday.
“Mum is from south Wales and we thought it would be nice to take her somewhere as a surprise,” she said of Crickhowell, a picturesque medieval market-town of around 2,000 people.
“All the local people we chatted to
Welsh crew that rescued the family said that it does flood a bit sometimes, but nobody was expecting this.”
Storm Dennis brought a month’s rainfall in two days and Wales suffered its worst flooding for 40 years.
The Usk, which runs through Crickhowell, broke its banks and rose to its highest ever recorded level.
By 10pm on Saturday, firefighters “were working hard but didn’t seem panicked” but, by the time the family went to bed, water had begun to ooze under the front door and Ms Perlman moved her valuables upstairs.
At 4am, firefighters knocked on the door and “sounded quite urgent and said that the river was going to go and that we need to evacuate”.
Within 30 minutes, the Usk had broken its banks and water began rising up the stairs of the house. “It was quite worrying... the firemen couldn’t safely come back to evacuate anyone at that point so they had to call rescue boats in from Hay-on-Wye and Camarthen.”
Ms Perlman and her family were trapped until 12.30pm, when they climbed through an upstairs window into a boat. During the wait, she said they tried to “keep perspective”.
“We were all saying ‘isn’t this nervewrecking and inconvenient’ but imagine being in a situation where you’ve been displaced and you are being flooded in a tented settlement. For us on holiday it was just a shame.”
Ms Perlman lives in Walthamstow with her Israeli husband and works at emergency aid NGO the International Rescue Committee.