And not a drop to drink

NIALL Huggard has a clear, calm image in his head, captured before dawn in his 19th-century, family-run Kerry hotel. "It was dry, the air was really crisp and cold and all I could see were the stars above. Red deer were swimming through the car park, and the water levels around us were rising like a scene from Titanic. Lough Leane was moving towards our doors, and I had 110 guests sleeping upstairs who were oblivious to everything.", writes LORNA SIGGINS, Western Correspondent

His night staff had called him in at 3am on Friday, November 20th, after the torrential rain of previous days, when waterfalls appeared where he had never seen them before on Mangerton, Torc and Purple mountains. He phoned a JCB driver, got a truck and trailer, rolled up his sleeves with the men and started filling sandbags in the dark.

“It is the first time I’ve ever done this. The hotel dates to 1820, the house to 1750 and we have no records of being flooded before,” Huggard says. He and his staff put down stones as markers, to record the peak height, which occurred at 1pm that day. By that time, some flooded ground-level staff accommodation had been evacuated. However, he was determined the guests would sleep on, safely upstairs. They woke up to a very different landscape overlooking Killarney National Park. Huggard and his team had isolated electrics, to ensure that there were hot showers, and a full cooked breakfast was served while waves from the lake lashed at the restaurant window. “When I look back, I don’t think we could have done it any better,” Huggard says. Guests were booked into alternative accommodation, and the hotel will reopen for business in January.

Huggard believes he is very lucky, as he has saved his business, when many others across the west and south have not been so fortunate. His surreal experience has been mirrored throughout the regions – people queuing in Cork city for drinking water as the River Lee burst its banks and flowed all around them, the Naval Service deploying the LE Orlaupriver at North Customs House quay, like an ark on standby, while its engineers pumped water from road tankers into the city's hospitals.

In Claregalway, Co Galway, a woman just about to give birth was among many who had to leave homes, some built on a flood plain, after the Clare River engulfed the village, and electricity was cut as a safety measure. The Garda had to come and rescue Castlerea prisoners en route to court in Galway when a Prison Service van became stuck on the bridge, while Fianna Fáil councillor Malachy Noone swapped his suit for a reflective jacket and wellies, and spent the week assisting constituents, and filling and delivering sandbags.

In south Galway, Frank Commins, who has 5,000 free-range hens, battled to keep his stock fed, while 62-year-old single farmer Mickey Morgan was shocked to find that his Peterswell home and farm had become an island he and his 30 cattle could not leave. In the east Galway town of Ballinasloe, the Suck ran down River Street and through the town centre, and the Derrymullen area close to the railway station; while Craughwell village, also on the N6 Galway-Dublin road, became completely impassable. In Gort, distraught furniture retailer Mike Finn articulated the heartbreak when he said he knew what “hell is like”.

“When you think of it, it has been raining for three years,” says Fine Gael councillor and former mayor of Ballinasloe, Michael Mullins. “There was just no soakage in the land any more. Murray’s family home and business in River Street has been hit so hard by this, as have many others, including several new businesses which were depending on the approaching Christmas trade to get a start,” Cllr Mullins says. “Now we have close to 150 families who may not be able to go home again this year. Out in Derrymullen, it was the residents in bungalows, many of them elderly, who lost almost everything,” he says. “The Army, Civil Defence, the community and groups such as the St Vincent de Paul have been fantastic. But I’d be very worried about the long-term health impact on people now.”

Willie Devlin, a resident of Ashfield Drive, Derrymullen, bears an air of quiet resignation as he explains how he intends to put a Christmas tree in the window, regardless. Only half a dozen of the 32 houses in his estate escaped evacuation. “One woman had cancer, and we took her out by dinghy, and we rescued another man who was bedridden, and whose wife has just had a hip replacement,” he says. “There was attempted looting in one of the nearby estates.” There were similar reports of attempted looting in parts of Co Galway.

THE HARSH REALITYis that this extreme weather is not a "one-off" event, according to climate experts such as geographers Dr John Sweeney of NUI Maynooth and Kieran Hickey of NUIG. Global warming predictions forecast increased winter rainfall, "mostly in the form of more severe individual events" and the recurrence interval is likely to become much shorter, according to Hickey.

The Irish Insurance Federation (IIF) agrees, having confirmed this week that flooding was becoming “predictable” rather than unexpected. The blame game began last weekend. The IIF claimed that too little funding for flood relief schemes was given to the Office of Public Works. However, that State department has undertaken successful work in areas such as Kilkenny, and has mapped flood-sensitive areas, but the maps may have to be revised.

The ESB was lashed for discharging water from Inniscarra dam into the River Lee, which affected the western area of Cork city last week. In fact, the board had warned local authorities, emergency services and local media of flooding risk, most recently on Monday, November 16th and at 11am on Thursday, November 19th. On Monday, November 23rd, the ESB explained that increased discharges from Parteen weir on the lower Shannon were imperative to avoid a “catastrophic” flow from Lough Derg into Limerick – the one stretch of the long, meandering 256km river that the ESB is able to control.

The president of the Irish Farmers’ Association, Padraig Walshe, criticised the lack of priority given to drainage, and said there were “too many agencies”. Fine Gael hit the Government over its delay in introducing a flood warning system, while in a letter to this newspaper, Quebec resident JoJo Boyle questioned the lack of adequate forecasting, given that real-time tracking of storms and global sea swell conditions is just one click of a mouse away on surfers’ website magicseaweed.com.

Several councillors in various parts of Galway acknowledged a collective irresponsibility for approving construction on floodplains. Co Leitrim’s Carrick-on-Shannon bears the nickname “Carrick-No-Shannon” since extensive property mushroomed on its riverbanks, and the examples are legion throughout the State.Under the EU Water Framework Directive, rivers must be protected as biological corridors, and hard engineering solutions such as arterial drainage can no longer proceed without careful environmental assessment of impact. Engineering constructs such as sea walls and filled gabions are not sustainable on coastlines either, due to high cost and adverse environmental impact, according to NUIG researchers involved in a new Atlantic alliance project on climate change and coastal planning. “As a nation, we need to realise the importance of ‘climate-proofing’ our policies,” says Dr Martina Prendergast, development manager of the Environmental Change Institute at NUIG and a participant in the project.

Climate-proofing emergency responses is also an imperative, according to some commentators. Security analyst Dr Tom Clonan has described the response of Government as a “textbook failure in strategic planning, co-ordinated emergency response and basic political communication”.

Sources working on emergency response this week told The Irish Times there is still some way to go to “join the dots”, and local authorities were finding it difficult to cope, but cautioned that the extent and severity of this past week’s flooding was almost impossible to anticipate. The head of the US Coastguard, Admiral Thad Allen, who was appointed by former US president George W Bush in 2006 to handle the response to Hurricane Katrina – which struck the southern coast of the US in 2005 – told The Irish Times this week that the trick was to learn from mistakes. He says a template emergency response centre with a “common language”, which can be replicated from crisis to crisis, is most effective.

FOR SOME YEARS, the IIF has called for a single flood-defence agency. Curiously, the Office of Emergency Planning, which is responsible to the Department of Defence, is for external threats only. For internal events, such as severe weather, there is no agency similar to the Irish Coast Guard at sea, and relevant departments become the "lead" responding agency – co-operating with, but not necessarily compelling, other departments to act.

However, Admiral Allen’s firm belief in a “national doctrine” with a “common language” is already in place here, according to Seán Hogan, the national director for Fire and Emergency Services and chairman of the Emergency Response Co-ordinating Committee. His committee has worked under the Department of the Environment on framework documents, national and regional emergency plans, for the past five years.

The emergency plans within lead agencies such as the local authorities, Garda, and HSE have a “common format”, and 1,300 senior staff from each of these three bodies have been trained on 88 courses, Hogan says. Protocols with the Irish Coast Guard, which have been delayed, will be completely shortly, he says. “It means there is a crisis management team in a multi-agency context in each local authority. At the same time, we will also learn lessons, and I look forward to doing a proper review.”

In the past week, five people died in floods in Cumbria, northern England, including a policeman directing traffic who was swept downriver when a bridge collapsed. “We know how people have suffered here,” Hogan says. “But thankfully we have had no loss of life.”