A man who found his mother’s lifeless body floating in flood water triggered by Storm Babet in her Chesterfield home has spoken of his anger that people in flood-prone areas are being “forgotten”.
It is thought that Maureen Gilbert, 83, drowned after she was unable to escape the rapidly rising water inside her terrace home owing to mobility problems.
Her son Paul Gilbert had spent Friday building 4ft-high flood defences in his mother’s house, something he had done for every flood warning since 2007, when the property was badly damaged by flooding.
Later that day he received a panicked phone call from Maureen, who said water was beginning to enter the house, and he told her to make her way upstairs.
It took seven hours for Paul to get back to the property through the floods with the help of the fire service. The rescue team broke a window but determined that the water was too high to safely enter the house and they would need to return the next morning.
“The water was nearly up to basically my eyes,” he said. “I was hoping she’d got upstairs and everything was all right and that we’d see her the next morning.”
He said he returned to the house on his own at 9.30am on Saturday and “came to the window, forced it open and found my mum floating in the water”.
He told Sky News: “I honestly can’t put it into words at the moment. There’s a bit of anger because nothing ever seems to get done. For me to have to come and find her myself was more the upsetting thing for me. I didn’t want to find my own mum and I expected somebody else to have found her.”
He added: “It ain’t hit in yet. I don’t think it has. I go through so many different stages … anger, upset. I don’t know, I can’t put it into words what it means at the moment.”
The family have created a crowdfunder to pay for Maureen’s funeral and to help clear the house, which was uninsured for flood damage as the insurance costs were unaffordable.
It reads: “She lived on the street all her life, rebuilding after the 2007 flood was hard for us and her but this is just devastating. We now only have memories as everything else is gone.”
Police initially issued a statement saying Maureen’s death was believed to be related to the flooding but Derbyshire constabulary later issued another statement saying “inquiries are ongoing into the circumstances of her death” and that the cause was “unascertained at this time”.
There have been three other confirmed deaths as a result of the storm.
