Residents are used to Shannon floods but this time it is worse than anyone thought possible
PEOPLE IN Carrick-on-Shannon are used to the unpredictable nature of the river that gives the town its name, but nothing like this. Every year the Shannon floods, usually in winter time. Sometimes it does so twice a year, but this is no ordinary flood.
Just outside the town, Leitrim Co Council has erected a temporary walkway over flood waters that separate the town centre and the Townparks area where I grew up.
On one side is a football pitch which is prone to flooding and on the other apartments and shops which have been built in the last 10 years. Underneath is a torrent of floodwater a metre and a half deep in places.
The water is so deep that lifebuoys have been put along its length in case anybody falls in.
“I’m 54 years on the Shannon and I’ve never seen the beat of this before,” said local man Johnny Quayle (64), echoing a familiar refrain you will hear from every person in the town.
“I was walking down towards the marina, the wind picked up and I seen nothing but walls of water heading towards the wall [of the football pitch] and it flew up in a big white spray. It was scary,” he said.
Yesterday, accountant Terry Casey spent the day removing furniture from his office opposite the football pitch. The water came in the back door on Wednesday.
He has had to relocate out of town and does not expect to get back for three months. “It’s complete devastation. It was tough enough as it was with the recession,” he said.
Long-time Carrick resident Donnacha Kennedy said the Shannon is now three quarters of a metre (30 inches) above its normal level and five inches above the previous record flooding in the town which happened in 2000. “People say this is a once in an 800-year event – I hope they are right.” The flooding is not just the worst in living memory or the worst in recorded history, it is worse than anybody thought possible.
The council’s director of services infrastructure, John McGuinness, described it as an “absolutely exceptional” situation pointing to the closure, for the first time, of a stretch of the N4 outside the town. The aptly named Landmark Hotel adjacent to the river Shannon has been saved from the deluge by its slightly higher elevation. Next to it, Cryans Hotel, owned by former Olympic rower, Frances Cryan is a hotel under siege with piles of sandbags outside.
Across the river on the Roscommon side, things are much worse. Carrick Retail and Business Park, which includes Supervalu and a new Cineplex, is completely under water.
There was disquiet locally when the Inver Geal apartment complex development was built near a bend on the Shannon.
Yesterday, Inver Geal resident Scott Barrow was moving the last of his belongings out of his ground floor apartment which is completely flooded. He has also lost his job in the local tile shop which is under two feet of water.
Minister for the Environment John Gormley has blamed bad planning, in particular on flood plains, for making a bad situation worse.
Local Fine Gael councillor and developer Gerry Reynolds, who built the large Rosebank Retail Park on a flood plain outside the town, said the issue was one of bad engineering as much as it was about bad planning.
“There were mistakes made definitely as were made at Inver Geal, but the Dutch build on the sea. There are engineering solutions to planning issues. I built on a flood plain, but we raised the whole thing on stilts.”