Weather

[mark smyth]

Martin Baxendale is from Gloucestershire - sorry for the slip of the finger

[Maggi Young]

There's just been mention, in another thread, of whether the AGS Garden at Pershore may be affected by the flooding. I have heard nothing but fear the worst.... there's a lot of water down there!
It has been sunny at times here today, which was pleasant as we had two surprise callers from Sweden, who have been up to Shetland, who came to visit us.  They were, as might be expected from an employee of the Gothenburg Botanic Garden and the Curator of a more northern Swedish Arboretum, delightful luncheon guests. There was much talk of rhododendrons and trees....wonderful!

[Rob]

I've just had a look at a satellite photo of Pershore and the AGS garden seems to be a reasonable distance from the river Avon. I guess the bridge will have been closed, so they will have been cut off from Pershore town centre, but the garden should be OK.

[David Nicholson]

Here are a few pictures (not very good ones!) taken in Tewkesbury in the March 2007 floods. Those at present are significantly worse (and I mean very significantly worse) indeed the place I stood to take these pictures, quite close to the confluence of the Rivers Severn and Avon, is I am told, at least five feet under water. The red brick buildings seen in the top right hand corner of some of the pictures is a water treatment works supplying drinking water to the Tewkesbury and Gloucester areas and is now inundated with water and unable to function and bottled water and supplies from bowsers are having to be brought in.

Last Friday we should have attended an outdoor concert by Jules Holland and his R&B Orchestra at Westonbirt Arboretum a few miles to the North East of Gloucester; luckily we found out that it had been cancelled owing to the weather whilst we were sitting in a massive traffic cue on the M5 north of Bristol. It took us over four hours to get to the hotel we had booked for the night just south of Cheltenham, a little over 20 miles from where the traffic jam started.

The following day we set out to try to get to mother in laws house in Ledbury, about 10 miles North West of Tewkesbury. The motorways were jammed solid and knowing the area quite well I tried a number of minor roads but all were either flooded or blocked by abandoned cars or rocks and gravel washed down from the hillsides. My route would have taken me through Evesham to Pershore but it was impossible to get through. To cut a long story short our journey back to Devon took us 9 hours. Absolute chaos.

But at least we had a bed for Friday night. Our daughter, who had spent the week working in Manchester, left Manchester at 1500 on Friday afternoon, by 2100 she had, with a struggle, got to just South of Worcester on the M5 (about 140 miles) before the Motorway ground to a halt, and there she stayed until 0645 the following morning. She was not pleased!!!

[Martin Baxendale]

People on the forum have been asking how it's going in Gloucestershire with the floods. It's hellish. We're okay on our side of Stroud, with tap water still running (despite numerous rumours it might go off as water is diverted to where it's most needed)  but the other side of the town (the side served by the same - submerged and non-operative - water treatment works as served flooded Tewkesbury and Gloucester) is without water, including my parents' house. We're being told it could be 7 to 14 days before the water's back on!

Residents from Tewkesbury, Gloucester and Cheltenham have been driving to Stroud to try to find bottled water in the supermarkets (their supermarkets have run out and supplies brought in my the military aren't keeping up with the demand, plus the water bowsers in the streets are running dry almost as soon as they're filled, and yobs are vandalising them!). It's approaching third-world standards. How hundreds of thousands of people are supposed to manage with no running water and no flushing toilets for up to two weeks I just don't know. The public health implications are horrendous. The hospitals are virtually non-operative too except for emergencies.

At least they managed to keep the electricity sub-station at Gloucester from submerging, otherwise we'd also have about half a million people in the area without power as well as about 300,000 without running water.

I was a reporter on the local paper in Cheltenham in the 1970s and ran the Tewkesbury offiice for a year, and I remember the locals then saying the flood defences being put up were totally inadequate for the confluence of two big rivers - the Severn and Avon, so it's been a disaster waiting to happen (apparently, money in recent years has been diverted from maintenance and improvement of existing flood defences to building new flood defences in areas of flood plains where new housing was being built).

Here in Stroud, no-one was even warned the water was going off. Looks like the people in charge forgot that half of Stroud was served by the same water treatment plant as Tewkesbury, Gloucester and Cheltenham! No-one even had time to fill a few buckets. And there are no water bowsers appearing here, and no distribution of free bottled water. So I have no idea how people are managing, except that I do know there's a fair bit of people on the water-running side of town helping out friends on the dry side with offers of showers, containers of water, etc. But in terms of organised response, it's a total cock-up.

Oh well, musn't grumble!

[Rob]

On television earlier it showed a reporter hitching a lift on a tractor to get to a cut off village near Gloucester. All the villagers were complaining that they had no water and no sign of any help.

Given the Met Office warning and flood gauges in the tributary rivers showing the amount of water heading towards Tewkesbury and Gloucester the response seems more chaotic than it should have been.

Looking at BBC news online it says 'There are further fears residents in northern parts of nearby Stroud could also lose running water because a crucial reservoir is running dry'.

I hope this doesn't affect you.

[mark smyth]

just look at this cloud from last night. The end is n'eye ( N Irish for now)

[Maggi Young]

Ian has a picture of a similar one over Aberdeen ,Mark but he is saving it for his bulb log next week.

[Paul T]

At one point while I was a teenager we had a massive storm front rolling in...... the edge ended up sitting almost straight above us (it was on a farm, so there was just our house, nothing around it except paddocks..... er that would be "fields" to most of you lot  ) and it was rolling over nad over, like a great barrel spinning in place.  I've never seen anything like it.  It was basically clear sky on one side, black clouds on the other, with this rolling interface where the lower edge of the clouds was rolling up the face and back into the clouds.  Mark's pic reminded me a bit of that.

Actually a bit more recently we had storms here (last summer, so definitely more recently!    It's been nearly 20 years since I was a teenager.  ) where as they moved in I was at a friends place and we went outside to watch the storm front.  There were fascinating eddies in the clouds etc and we could have sworn that at one point we saw a funnel forming (Tornadoes in storms are not something that is common in the majority of Australia).  Heard a few hours later that a mini tornado touched down in the next suburb shortly after we were out watching, so we probably did actually see the funnel starting to form.  I think I actually took a pic of it with my digital camera too, although it is never the same in two dimensions as it is when you see it in person.  Storms are just such amazing things!!

[mark smyth]

pssst! 9pm and 21c. Lovely south wind blowing

[mark smyth]

The warm wind stayed until yesterday morning.

While the south east baked today we had one inch 2.5 cm of rain that has cleared way now, 8pm, too late to be of use

[Maggi Young]

Aberdeen was dull but dry while I was at the BBC working but it has got pretty wet now. Stops and starts a bit but overall it is soggy! Not so mild, either.

[Maggi Young]

Last night went from bad to worse.... torrential rain all night and more thunder and lightning than I am prepared to tolerate...Lily didn't like it either. Ian roused himself long enough to come downstairs to unplug the pc etc.....I think he was actually sleepwalikng... nothing bothers that man!
Hasn't been too bad today but looks like more rain will come during the night.... will the repotting EVER be finished at this rate?

[Anthony Darby]

Going from sunny and 31^oC and very humid to 11^oC and constant drizzle is a bit of a shock to the system. BTW Paul, we have paddocks - small grassy areas surrounded by a fence with a horse (or three) in it. Fields are bigger. Talking of grass. We flew into Atlanta on Saturday lunchtime. Lots of houses with big spaces round each one (well, bigger than yer average UK housing scheme), but I could not see anything that actually resembled garden. All lawns: as if roads, houses and driveways had just been plonked onto a field!

[mark smyth]

40mm 1.5 inches of rain fell over the last 24 hours on the daty of the AGS Ulster Group annual picnic fund raising day. Lots of money was raised anyway for the John McWhirter travel fund