Town hit by floods as banks burst
CARMARTHENSHIRE bore the brunt of the rainfall that swept across Wales through Friday and into the weekend.
Parts of Carmarthen town were severely flooded after the River Towy burst its banks and the main A484 road was impassable at Llechryd, in Ceredigion, after the River Teifi flowed across the valley floor.
Flooding at Carmarthen was made worse by the fact the swollen river met high tide at 9.30am on Saturday and many businesses along the river banks were badly affected.
Dafydd Williams, from Llangunnor, said: “Businesses have already been badly hit by Covid and having to close at 6pm every day. Now they’re clearing stock from where they’ve been flooded.”
Parts of the Brecon Beacons had the most rainfall in Wales on Friday – with 98mm falling at Llyn-yFan in Carmarthenshire, making it the third wettest place in the UK. That compares to Wales’s average December rainfall of 166mm (6.5in) for the whole month.
But other parts of Wales were also hit, with pictures showing flooding around Newbridge on Usk, where a delivery van was caught in flood water.
Tom Morgan, a Met Office meteorologist, said the amount of rainfall recorded at Llyn-y-fan Blaenau was “well over what we would expect to fall. For those upland areas we generally see around 200 to 250mm rain expected across the whole of December. So we saw roughly half a month’s worth of rain falling in a day in those locations and even at lower levels we saw quite widely 30 to 50mm of rain.”
Llechryd was also severely affected by floodwaters, with a number of properties flooded inside as river levels in the Teifi spilled out onto the road.