Churchtown Flood Action Group, Part 2: Roger & John
Roger Weatherell and head flood warden John Bracken explain the plan to defend the town from further floods. The second in a series of stories about the impacts of floods in Churchtown.
Listen to Roger and John’s stories:
Retired engineer Roger Weatherell had just moved to Churchtown in 2015 when the first major flood happened. In these interviews he described how he helped build the first community-led construction of a significant flood defence scheme in the UK. He did it while recovering from illness, which he touches on too. We also had a chat with John Bracken, who’s the head flood warden for Churchtown. John runs a local pest control business.
This is the second episode in a series telling the stories of members of the Churchtown flood defence group. Churchtown is a village in Lancashire which was flooded from river overflow twice in the space of 8 months in 2015 and 2016.
Notes for listeners:
When Roger refers to the “EA”, he means the Environment Agency.
John mentions 'Siriol Hogg' - Siriol kickstarted the defence scheme group in Churchtown, but no longer lives there.
Edit: The original version of this post claimed Roger Weatherell helped to form the first flood action group in the country. Churchtown FLAG is not the first FLAG. He helped build the first community-led construction of a significant flood defence scheme in the UK.
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“For us personally, my thoughts were that we needed to move again although we had just moved into the area...I’m going to be stuck here forever because of this damn flood...
I was quite ill at the time. I was not eating, I was on a stomach pump, and on top of everything else I thought: “how are we going to get out of this?”
“Water arrived during the evening and it flowed across our lawn...Our power went off and stayed off...The road outside here was just another river, with bins and everything just going down the road.”
“It seemed at the beginning like more people were stopping us doing it than wanting us to do it...
58 houses were flooded out of about 100, and what [the authorities] would have done would have cost far more that the way we did it. We did it in a very practical way.”
“It is getting wetter but what is worse with climate change is the intensity of the occurrences.”
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Stories From Round Our Way. Everyday conversations with people impacted by climate change.