Our parish was badly affected by floods in November 2024, and even for a rural area that has experienced flooding before, it was a bit of a shock. Nobody was at fault, and everybody had done what they were supposed to:

• The Met Office weather forecast was accurate.
• The Environment Agency had sent their alerts.
• The Parish Council had distributed sandbags well in advance.
• There was a Flood Warden.

Homeowners were somewhere on a scale from “very well-prepared” to “not at all prepared”. On the day of the storm and in the clean-up afterwards, Crudwell pulled together in so many wonderful ways; including rushing to help neighbours in need, and preventing classrooms from flooding at the Primary School.

The sort of questions that came up after the Storm were:

• What can be done for the worst hit residents?
• How many properties in total were affected?
• When was the river last cleared? What about ditches and culverts?
• Why can’t we close the main road?
• Why did people insist on driving through deep water?
• Did we have enough sandbags? Where were they?
• Who stole our roadsigns?

The group was started because there was a dawning reality that nobody was at fault, nobody did anything wrong, and no body was coming to help us. In the aftermath of Storm Bert, the Parish Council needed to know (appropriate to privacy) what parts of the village were affected, and how. So what started as listening to neighbours, became a growing chat group with two, then three, then five, 10, and eventually 20 residents, all wanting to do something about it. Creating the Flood Action Group made flooding a shared problem, and the group started by talking about what it might tackle first.

Photos provided by residents.