A Hackney woman was forced to canoe across a car park outside her flat after floods hit East London. Original artwork and thousands of pounds of books were reportedly damaged by the flood, said to have been caused by the banks of a nearby canal bursting after a night of heavy rain.
One resident described wading through water to rescue her pets and said she will have to replace “everything” on the ground floor. At 10.16pm on Thursday (January 4), 10 fire engines and around 70 firefighters were called to flooding over a 10-acre area in Hackney Wick, particularly affecting Dace Road and Wick Lane, the London Fire Brigade (LFB) said.
Crews were on the scene until around 4.30am and LFB officers led to safety around 50 people, some of whom stayed in a nearby art gallery. A further 100 people were affected by the incident and the water reached 50cm deep at its peak, a senior firefighter said.
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Rosie Lawrence, 26, has two cats and a dog and waded across Dace Road to rescue them as water poured into her ground floor flat “like a river”. The mental health charity worker said she thinks her fridge, oven, dishwasher, washing machine, sofas, rugs and any other items on the ground floor will be damaged beyond repair.
She shared footage of her friend canoeing across the car park by the flats in the dark, wearing a long-sleeved shirt and shorts. She said she walked through the cordon put up by emergency services, adding: “I was across the road and flatmates and my pets were in (the flat). They had taped it off but I came through to get to them and I was wading through water up to short-person waist height.
“Then it all just happened really quickly. It started to go into all the units and it was filling in. It was like a river down the corridor. I tried to get sandbags. Nobody would give us any. I asked the firemen and they said, ‘We don’t do that, you need to ask the local council’. I called Tower Hamlets Council and they said, ‘Because you’re a private property we can’t supply you any sandbags’.
“So we literally just had to try and get all of our valuable goods off the floor, pets upstairs. We’re fortunate that we have a mezzanine level but not all of the units do.” Ms Lawrence said there are two bedrooms on the ground floor and two on the mezzanine level in the five-person flat.
Her property is part of a multi-unit converted warehouse complex, formally a peanut factory, with more than a dozen flats “flooded”. Simon Goode, 40, from Leyton said inches of water flooded into his bookshop and print studio in Dace Road on Thursday night, in a building also used by artists.
'Our rare and expensive equipment has been badly damaged'
A friend alerted him to the flood and on arriving at the London Centre for Book Arts he discovered he could not enter because the water outside was “about 10 inches” high by 11pm. He feared more water would pour into the building if he opened the front door; by 1am the water had not gone down and he left. When he returned on Friday morning, he discovered “at least half” of his 2,000 square foot studio had been flooded, including the professional artists’ workspaces, he said.
Speaking from the shop, where many of the books were visibly wet and warped, he said: “When we were finally able to enter the studio and assess the flooding and the damage, it’s been quite bad. There’s been at least a few inches of water all across the studio.
“A significant amount of our books and our paper stores and our equipment has all been pretty badly damaged. We teach classes. We’ve got really rare and expensive equipment. It’s going to be thousands and thousands of pounds. If you think a shelf of books is £300 or £400, it’s not really ideal.
“I don’t know how many buckets of water they’ve poured out. They’re still going. All the studios are flooded. All morning we’ve been doing buckets of water. There are painters and sculptors and one of the painters, a lot of her work has been damaged. I dread to think (about) the damage.
“Definitely I think a lot of paintings and sculptures have been damaged in the building. They’re kind of damaged beyond repair from what I can see.”
Photographer Dai Sasaki has had a studio in Dace Road for 11 years and lives above itWater marks several inches high have stained the walls and plants and litter have been spread throughout the building, which he said has never flooded before.
The 47-year-old said: “Water was coming through the door at I think 12 o’clock (at night). You’ll have to redo the flooring and there was some damage to the walls. Mainly it’s a lot of damage to the electricity but I need to ask the electrician. We are very worried about the electricity.
“After 3am automatically it (the flood) was gone. It might happen again. Nowadays it’s rainy quite a lot. It was easy for it to go that far up the wall.
“The other studio is quite wet and very bad conditions. My one is sometimes very empty and there was not much furniture so I was a bit lucky."
'Significant amounts of water that came up and over the canal'
Speaking from the scene, LFB group commander Stewart Gordon said the water was still rising to its 50cm peak when firefighters arrived. He said: “Being out of the street in those kids of conditions is very difficult. You can’t see what’s underneath it.
“We had significant rainfall in the area and obviously that led to the water levels across London rising, and the canal being where it is there, that meant that there was a significant amount of water that came up and over the canal and into the local area. Most of the properties we found were safe and secure and we don’t believe there will be any additional weak spots caused by this flooding.
“As far as we’re concerned there was no significant damage, no structural damage, that we needed to worry about.” Mr Gordon said drainage systems coped well with the overflow but damp and mould could be an ongoing issue.
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