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Six floods in five years: life in Yorkshire's Calder valley

<span>Photograph: Richard Saker/The Observer</span>
Photograph: Richard Saker/The Observer

Kelly Ramsden hardly sleeps a wink when heavy rain is forecast. Last Saturday, when the army was deployed to Yorkshire’s Calder Valley to build flood defences in preparation for Storm Dennis, the 39-year-old was up half the night fretting.

She doesn’t have to wait for flood sirens to know if she needs to switch from slippers to wellies. The window of her attic bedroom looks up towards the moors and she can gauge how soggy her kitchen will be by the amount of water rushing down the hillside towards the cobbled alley at the back of her house. From her living room, she can guess whether the River Calder, speeding along just 15 metres away behind a waist-high wall, is going to cause problems downstream in Hebden Bridge or Mytholmroyd.

Just over five years ago, Ramsden moved into a early-19th-century stone cottage on Burnley Road in Todmorden. Since then, she has been flooded six times, most recently on 9 February during Storm Ciara, when a month’s worth of rain fell on the valley in 24 hours.

Though a caterer by trade, she becomes a full-time flood defender during times of high rainfall. She knows how to wrench the lid off a blocked storm drain (with brute strength and, ideally, a friend). She knows which “floodproof doors” should be done for trade descriptions violations (the useless ones Calderdale council paid for in her house at a cost of several thousand pounds). She knows which switches to flick to keep the lights on upstairs when downstairs is underwater. And she has even become a human beaver, making dams to divert water away from her house with five coffee sacks, five huge rubble sacks and eight sandbags.

A side road which floods after much rainfall next to a house in Todmorden.
A side road which floods after much rainfall next to a house in Todmorden. Photograph: Richard Saker/The Observer

On Thursday night, Ramsden was out in her sparkly wellies and leopard-print leggings, hair divided into Pippi Longstocking plaits, wondering whether to start building the dam again as rain lashed down. Her house had survived Storm Dennis but what about Storm Ellen, expected at any time?

Next door, Barbara Campion was in despair. “It’s hit me harder, psychologically, this time than before,” sighed the 64-year-old, her ground floor still in disarray 10 days after Ciara flooded 1,200 properties in the Calder Valley. In the living room, her dog, Roxy, scuttled around the bare concrete floor: like everyone in this little row of houses, she gave up on carpets several floods ago.

She knew she’d been flooded again on the ninth before she even came downstairs: “You can smell it: damp, stagnant water.” For Campion, who suffers from ME, the stress and cold that comes with flooding causes terrible joint and muscular pain, as well as extreme fatigue.

Campion bought the property in July 2017, knowing it had flooded during Boxing Day 2015, along with 3,000 properties across Calderdale. “But I didn’t think it would happen again,” she said. Now she feels stuck: “I don’t know where to go next or how to adapt. I mean, it’s not like you can say: ‘Never mind, I’ll sell up.’ Because you’re not going to get the same money and you’re not going to get anything to replace it.”

The cottages have changed hands in recent years for between £73,000 and £128,000 – cheap for the area but a big financial burden if no one will buy them. “It’s hit me this time just how alone I am. The community is brilliant, and the neighbours, but I feel very alone,” said Campion.

Map showing River Calder

Flooding repeatedly is a profoundly depressing experience, said Ramsden. She remembers driving through Mytholmroyd after the Boxing Day floods in 2015 and seeing “grown men crying” as they threw out their belongings. “I’m quite a worrier anyway, so I lose sleep from it. When it rains I am constantly waking up because I can see the drain that blocks from my bedroom, so I am constantly getting up and checking it and moving things up off the floor all the time, moving the dog upstairs. It’s stressful.”

Two doors down, hairdresser Carla Welch was determined to put on a brave face, despite having only three months ago finished renovating her downstairs after the last flood, in July. People keep asking if she regrets buying the house in October 2018. Not at all: “I love living here more after the floods. I know all my neighbours now. I feel very safe here, actually. We all stick together.”

Unlike her neighbours, Welch has flood insurance. The company was quick to install two dehumidifiers soon after Ciara swept through the valley, which have been humming away 24/7 ever since in her kitchen and front room. Her premiums are already £50 a month and she is crossing her fingers she’ll be able to renew.

The latest flood has already cost Ramsden dearly. She runs her vegan and vegetarian catering company, Beets and Beans, from her kitchen, which has been out of action for almost two weeks. She supplements that income by working in a basement bar in Hebden Bridge, Nelson’s, which has been closed since Storm Ciara. She has applied for grants: earlier this week, the government said it would fund up to £500 in financial hardship payments for flood-hit households and grants of up to £2,500 for small-to-medium sized businesses that have “suffered severe, uninsurable losses”.

Furniture stacked high to dry out after flooding at Carla Welch’s home in Todmorden.
Furniture stacked high to dry out after flooding at Carla Welch’s home in Todmorden. Photograph: Richard Saker/The Observer

Everyone in Calderdale has their own theory of what causes the flooding. Ramsden and her neighbours are sure water runs down faster from the hillside since six new houses were completed above them in the past two years, linked by a Tarmac road. The drains can’t cope, either.

Dongria Kondh, the mother of Ramsden’s ex-boyfriend, is certain mismanagement of the moorlands is to blame. She is the coordinator of Treesponsibility, a climate action group that is planting 10,000 trees in the valley and on Thursday began a hunger strike outside Natural England’s Leeds office to demand an investigation into “seemingly unconsented works and moorland burning on a big grouse shooting estate above Hebden Bridge”. The protest seemed to work, and on Friday Natural England said it would be conducting a site visit to the moor next week and would work with Treesponsibility on solutions.

Ramsden would like more help. “I knew when I moved to Todmorden it could flood and I’m prepared to manage my house as good as I possibly can. But I need help with the drains and the building behind the house. Even building the little dam I do, I shouldn’t have to do that really,” she said. “But if we chose to live in this valley we need to work with the council and the government. People who live here love it. They don’t want to leave.”