After the anguish, came the anger. As flood waters subsided across the south Wales valleys and devastated residents and business owners surveyed the damage done by Storm Bert, questions were being asked about whether warnings were adequate.
Many of the overwhelmed towns and villages experienced similar devastation in 2020 when Storm Dennis swept through – yet those interviewed by the Guardian said little, if anything, had been done to future-proof against floods and storms in the intervening years.
Pontypridd, in Rhondda Cynon Taf, was one of the worst affected towns, where the banks of the River Taff burst and flooded dozens of properties.
Jenna Cowley, 38, is the co-owner of Storyville Books on Mill Street, where the flood waters rose through the drains and overwhelmed the district of independent shops and businesses.
Cowley was stacking surviving books into plastic storage boxes, salvaging what she could; the floors and lower shelves of the bookcases were grimy with brown water stains and a dehumidifier buzzed in the doorway. A larger space to the rear, which they recently acquired and launched their first event in recently, was also drenched.
She and her partner and co-owner Jeff Baxter were notified of the rising waters only by a neighbouring business, the cafe Zucco, whose owner posted images on Instagram.
“We had a yellow warning but we’ve had a lot of those and nothing much has happened,” she says. “So we didn’t think much of it.”
After seeing Zucco’s posts, Baxter came down to the store to discover the waters had tripped the electrics controlling the shutters. With help from neighbouring business owners, they opened them and discovered the damage inside.
Cowley says about £15,000 worth of damage was done “in the lead up to Christmas”.
She says there are questions to be asked and answers needed over why the flooding happened.
“It wasn’t the water that’s coming from the river and coming up the street. It’s come up out of the drainage system, and then also the back of the building has been flooded,” she says.
“I’m not an expert in that area but obviously some support and some answers and some investigations so that it doesn’t happen again are needed“We didn’t get a flood warning, the alarm was raised by Zucco.”
Across the street, the owner of Zucco, Enrico Orsi, is open for business but, similarly, wants answers. “I don’t want to point the finger,” he says. “But obviously it’s happened here before.
“In 2020, Storm Dennis wiped out a whole generation of businesses here. Obviously, the powers – Natural Resource Wales, the council, Welsh Water – they know that it’s a vulnerable area.”
Orsi says he understands a pump system had been installed beneath the street, “But obviously that failed … so there are a lot of questions. They know that this place is vulnerable.”
He received no warning, he says. “I wasn’t expecting it at all. If I had known, then I would have put my flood barriers in, and other businesses could have made whatever precautions they would have needed to.”
Orsi managed to protect his cafe by frantically putting its floodgate barriers in place after fortuitously arriving early enough to witness the water “shooting up like a fountain” from the drains.
On Sion Street, which is all that separates the River Taff from a row of terrace houses that run parallel to the watercourse, residents are assessing damage to their properties.
Phillip Caddy, 67, is now the landlord of a property that used to be his home, and was on-site to check on his tenant and set up dehumidifiers to dry out the water that entered the rear of the property. He too says he did not receive any timely warning about the floods.
“The gate and the wall to the front of the house actually held, but the water got into the back, when the rain overflowed from the gutters,” he says.
Paula Williams, whose house on Sion Street flooded, blamed Natural Resources Wales (NRW) for not listening to them the last time there was flooding.
She says: “This time there’s only about four inches of water come in but it’s in exactly the same place that we told NRW about last time, and they didn’t do anything about it.”
They received a flood warning at about 7.40am on Sunday, by which time the river had already burst its banks, she says.
About 25 miles away in Cwmtillery, Blaenau Gwent, residents were evacuated after a landslip from a coal tip left a trail of destruction. The incident left buildings deep in sludge and mud as water poured down Woodland Terrace.
The landslip was a “singular wash-out of a former coal tip in the area”, the Welsh government says, adding that the tip was category D – the most potential impact on public safety.
Becky Ashford-Singer, 32, whose home was missed by the river of mud by metres says she had never seen anything like it and is frightened about future recurrences.
“Our concern now is – obviously they’re clearing the water at the bottom of the hill now but the top of the hill is the problem – so there’s been a landslide, which surely means that there’s gonna be another one,” she says.
Another 10 miles south, the Cross Keys rugby club in Caerphilly county borough, near Newport, is reeling from the devastation caused by the River Ebbw, which burst its banks and flooded the rugby pitch before overwhelming the clubhouse itself.
Colin Vernell, the chair of the social club, was helping with the cleanup effort on Monday as carpets were stripped, electrics were rewired and furniture was hosed down.
He says the club was hit in 2020 during Storm Dennis and “no lessons have been learned since”.
“We have spoken to the council to see what they can do about it when it happened last time. But no joy, nothing.”
Sian Williams, the head of operations north-west for NRW, said the agency would look into whether any part of its data-gathering for Storm Bert had not been done correctly.
