'This is bigger than the Northampton floods of 1998,' says expert, as Storm Bert wreaks havoc on the county

Significant flooding hit Northamptonshire overnight, prompting a multi-agency response to support those affected by Storm Bert.

The Chronicle and Echo spoke with Ben Thorley of the Environment Agency (EA), who said: “The rate at which the river rose was incredible; we’ve not seen that before. This is the biggest flood we’ve had since the 1998 flooding in Northampton. It’s bigger than that. A huge amount of rain—180 tonnes of water per second—was coming past Southbridge in Northampton. After 1998, we built a series of flood defences that protected the town, and they’ve done a fantastic job this time around.”

Billing Aquadrome has been one of the worst affected areas, as it is built on a floodplain, and has seen hundreds of residents evacuated after the site was deemed a ‘risk to life’ by the EA.

Mr Thorley said: “At about 2am, we issued the severe flood warning for Billing Aquadrome on the basis that the river levels were increasing extremely rapidly on the back of 60 millimetres of rain yesterday across the Upper Nene catchment area.

"We have a flood storage reservoir between the town and the Aquadrome, and we use that to store as much water as we can. But there was far more water coming down the system than that reservoir can hold, and that’s why we issued a flood warning… because we were concerned about risk to life.”

Flooding has also occurred in parts of the county that rarely experience such events, including Weedon and Harlestone villages.

Commenting on this, Mr Thorley said: “Sadly, across the county, there have been properties that have flooded through a mix of surface water and river flooding. We still don’t know the number of properties flooded, but it will be very significant. We’ve seen incredible flooding across the Nene catchment. We’ve seen properties that have never flooded before, flood. A lot of properties have flooded from surface water, so runoff from the surrounding land has caused real problems throughout the county.”