‘We can’t live in this’: the tightknit Chesterfield street devastated by flooding
Almost every square inch of the houses along Tapton Terrace in Chesterfield is covered in a thick layer of wet brown mud.
Inside the homes, brown lines across the walls show that water levels reached a height of 1.5 metres (5ft).
Wallpaper has been ripped off, carpets reduced to soaking rags, and piles of rubbish – once treasured belongings – have been dumped outside in the mudcaked street.
“We had the flood defences up but the water came over the top and started pouring through the letterbox and broke the back door off. Well, you’ve got no hope by then,” said Lorna Squires, 56, who has lived in her house for 13 years.
On Friday night the Derbyshire street was one of many inundated by flood water when the nearby River Rother burst its banks as Storm Babet battered the country.
“All we could hear all night was the furniture smashing, and the next morning there was so much debris in the garden we had to break our way out. And the mud. It’s horrendous, I’ve never seen anything like it,” said Squires.
In the house two doors down lived Maureen Gilbert, 83, whose body was found in the flood water on the ground floor of her home on Saturday.
It is thought she might have drowned as mobility issues meant she was unable to escape the rapidly rising water, which residents say took just 20 minutes to take hold.
Her death has devastated the closeknit street, most of whom knew her and assumed she was safe in the upstairs of her home. Outside her front door, alongside the sandbags, neighbours had left bouquets of flowers in her memory.
Her son, Paul, said he had built 4ft-high flood defences outside his mother’s home on Friday, and when he received a panicked phone call from her later in the day saying water levels were rising, he advised her to stay upstairs.
A broken window at the property shows where rescue teams had attempted to reach her, before deciding it was too dangerous to enter.
“The water was nearly up to basically my eyes. I was hoping she’d got upstairs and everything was all right and that we’d see her the next morning,” he told Sky News.
But when he returned at 9.30am on Saturday, he said he “came to the window, forced it open and found my mum floating in the water”.
“I honestly can’t put it into words at the moment. There’s a bit of anger because nothing ever seems to get done. For me to have to come and find her myself was more the upsetting thing for me,” he said.
Anne Squires, 38, Lorna’s daughter, who lives further up the street with her husband, Eliot, 48, and their son, Odin, 11, said Gilbert’s death had been hard to take.
“It is upsetting. She’s always been here, she’s been through the floods with us all before,” she said.
“A lot of us have said, if we had known she was still in that house and we knew she was downstairs, we would have risked our lives to fetch her out.”
Anne Squires, who has a disability, said her car and two mobility scooters were ruined by the water, along with most of their belongings on the ground floor of the house.
“I still haven’t even finished paying off my sofa and I checked the paperwork this morning and it’s not covered for flood damage. So I have to keep paying for it even though it’s ruined,” she said.
Stephanie Winnard was one of many who installed flood defences at her home after flash flooding in June 2007, although the barriers proved futile in the face of the water levels, the highest ever recorded.
“We thought it would be inches of water, if that, but no – we had 5ft of water. It came up the drains, the toilets, it comes from everywhere and you’ve got no chance,” Winnard said.
“I put a few things on top of the table thinking it would be OK but it got everything. We can’t live in this and we’ll be out [of the house] for about a year I bet.”
A fundraising appeal for the flood victims in Chesterfield has raised nearly £28,000 in a few days, but residents said there needs to be a longer-term solution to support them and prevent future flooding.
“I am very worried about it happening again because they’re building on flood plains. It’s been 16 years since it last happened but it’s getting worse everywhere,” Winnard said.
“I sometimes wish the council would just buy us out and flatten it. They’re going to have to do something.”
“We need better flood defences, and the river needs dredging – we’ve been after that since 2007 and nothing has been done. It’s full of silt,” said Lorna Squires, who, like many on the road, was unable to afford home insurance when premiums were raised after previous flooding.
But she said the closeness of the community on Tapton Terrace means she has no plans to leave, and will simply replace the items she has lost.
“It is devastating but the way I see it, it’s material possessions and the expense of replacing it all is going to be astronomical,” she said. “But we lost our neighbour and this is nothing compared to the loss of a life.”