Floodwater makes a strange and almost haunting sound; all the more frightening for being relatively quiet. This is water at its most dangerous, the point where it seems to assume a malevolent personality. The waves and pulses – yes, the river seems to pulse – whisper quietly to one another – they plan, they finger the banks as if they were looking for weaknesses; they race past me faster than a decent runner could manage . Imagine the sibilance of a flock of roosting starlings with the volume turned down; busy, organised and purposeful. The swans have decamped to a newly made lake among the houses opposite. With both towpaths flooded and impassable, we residents gather in small knots at the end of the terrace to watch, take photographs and peer upwards through the leafless trees and watch a police helicopter hovering overhead, praying that there’s no lost soul tumbling lifelessly along the scoured river bed.
It seems to have rained every day for over a month. Monsoon quantities of water soaking the ground and washing thousands of tons of impoverished soil into the river. The old floodgates have become cranky and unreliable and there’s even talk about removing them altogether because the Council have invested millions in a new flood relief scheme which works by storing the overflowing water among terraces which they hope will be filled with shoppers thronging a new retail centre in the summer. I spoke to a council worker early this morning who told me that the previous record height at the spot we were standing was 5.5m. Today it was 5.1m and rising. Maybe someone miscalculated, I wondered, with all these new build blocks of studio flats with a handsome premium for river frontage – maybe a river frontage in the midst of a climate catastrophe is like a ringside seat at an earthquake. Maybe an underground carpark below river level is tempting a providence that’s turning bad on us. Who even knows where we go from here?
This is not an act of god, this is an act of revenge for the raging stupidity of those who caused the problem. Last night on local television we learned that some SUV drivers had been driving at speed down flooded streets – because they could – creating bow waves that washed away the householders’ sandbags and caused their houses to flood. Words fail me.
