The heaviest rainfall ever recorded in the south of Scotland in a single day brought flooding chaos to the Borders last Thursday.
But the scenes of devastation in Cumbria and Dumfries & Galloway were thankfully not replicated, although Scottish Borders Council’s emergency planning officer Ian Hogarth reckoned around 20 homes, mainly in the Yarrow and Ettrick valleys, were inund
ated by water.
“That may be an underestimate, however, because not everyone reports domestic flooding and it remains a personal matter between householders and their insurance companies,” admitted Mr Hogarth.
By late on Thursday night, the Met Office observatory at Eskdalemuir had recorded 3.5inches of rain in the previous 24 hours, smashing the daily record of 2.5inches set in 1931.
The previous day, Mr Hogarth and other members of the multi-agency Flood Co-ordination Team, chaired by police superintendent Douglas Forsyth, had met in the basement of SBC’s HQ in Newtown, with telephone links to both the Met Office and the Scottish Environment Protection Agency.
“In my 10 years in this job, it was the most pessimistic forecast of sustained rain over a wide area, so all the emergency services, including our own manual workers and social work staff, were on full alert. Shift patterns were altered to ensure we had enough weekend cover, particulary as more rain, which failed to materialise, was forecast for Saturday.”
His pessimism was fuelled first by a severe flood warning, entailing a significant risk to life and property, issued early on Thursday for the River Teviot, followed by similar alarms for the Ettrick Water, Yarrow Water and upper Tweed, with the lower Tweed and Jed Water being included at midnight.
Although there was some flooding to low-lying business properties in Hawick’s Commercial Road, the Teviot subsided in the afternoon.
The focus of concern then switched to the Selkirkshire valleys and Peebles. Emergency evacuation arrangements were put in place by social workers at two care homes for the elderly at Tweed Green in Peebles and at Riverside in Selkirk, but neither facility was flooded.
Pupils from Teviothead, Roberton and Denholm were sent home early from Hawick High School and Ettrick, Yarrow, Kirkhope (Ettrickbridge) and Hobkirk primaries were closed. They remained closed on Friday.
In the event, it was the Yarrow valley downstream of St Mary’s Loch which bore the brunt, with a number of homes also flooded in the Ettrick valley early on Thursday.
