Hull Floods 14 year retrospective

It was 14 years ago to this very week that it rained. I can remember it very well for a number of small, trivial reasons and two massive ones.

The day started off with the sighting by me and my son of a wild deer which was, with no regard to its own welfare, just grazing and gazing within the excavated bowl of the new road junction about 2 miles from our house. How it had got into the inner sanctum was not clear and after our initial wonderment at just having seen such a timid, sprightly creature, we did express concern about how it might get back into its more natural environment farther up the wooded hillside swopping a forest ride for the busy dual carriageway.

We were on the way to the unreasonably early start of a car boot sale at a new venue for us. It had promised well from chatting with other sellers at our usual recreational field pitch. It was in more affluent catchment area, close to a motorway junction for casual passing buyers, well established and popular or so we had been told. It actually turned out to be well away from any population areas, off the main traffic flows, in an old chicken farm and quite a dead loss in terms of actual trade. We had arrived early and were directed by a toothless old boy, the smallholder, to a narrow, claustrophobic pitch even for one outside, right in the middle of an old strawberry field complete with canes and wires.

It was the first sale we had participated at that we had not been pounced upon by dealers and scavengers as soon as we had opened the tailgate of the car. That did not promise much for the rest of our confinement in that place because we were now well and truly trapped by the slow build up of other sellers. There would be no possibility of leaving early even if we felt like giving the whole thing up. The first couple of hours dragged by with only a few pounds sterling to show for our endeavours. My best offering of a Champions League Final programme, £8 from WH Smiths, was looking a bit sorry and curling up at the edges in quite a fierce and persistent heat from the sun and with no respite from any shelter or shade.

My son first remarked on some quite magnificent towering cloud structures that had sailed from the west into the otherwise powder blue sky. They were like nothing I had ever seen before, and I had always made a point of commenting on such phenomena with the children and so knew what constituted a noteworthy cluster. Billowing, dazzling white. The occasional vapour trails of high flying passenger jets seemed to punch through the meringue-like peaks which again was something I had not seen before. We were certainly witnessing quite an unusual formation.

Such was our concentration on the clouds that our entire stock and the pasting table itself could have been whisked away by unscrupulous car-booters and we would not have noticed. Our meteorological observations made the morning fly by.

Then a gap in our closely packed row opened up as a fellow seller expressed frustration and upped and went and we too made our escape.

That very afternoon was to be at the 90th birthday party of a family friend. My son and me were quite radiant facially from a south facing morning and were expecting to attract attention as a consequence from the other guests.

As we arrived at Clarice's house for a garden party the mountainous Cumulus, which had followed us from the farmyard into town were in freefall. The collapse resembled a slow motion avalanche into a dirty grey full sky cover of rain cloud and with a strong driving wind now developing. The party, momentarily basking in the heat , had to retreat indoors in what became a torrential downpour and with no indications of a reprieve or even a brief sunny interval.

The rain continued for the next 36 hours and developed into the misery of the Hull flood with hundreds of houses inundated in flash flooding and from the complete overwhelming of the foul and surface drainage systems over large parts of the urban and suburban areas.

This weekend, the fourteenth anniversary of the floods has fortunately, so far, not followed on from a similar spate of weather.  

There has been some heavy and persistent rainfall but interspersed with close to 25 degree heat to evaporate any surplus moisture,  The clay soils which underlie much of the low lying Hull have not been able to fill up and unlike 2007 we may have much less to worry about on this anniversary. 

I am sure that lessons have been learned from the events of  14 years ago. 

There is no guarantee that a similar chain of events will not occur again and chances are given the unpredictability of Climate Change we will certainly see their like again.

Trumping the Queen

 It was, back in the early 1980’s, just a bit of harmless fun. 

If we attempted the same today we would, for certain,be shot on sight. 

Giggling a bit, as excitable 17 year olds are prone to do, a group of us made our way up a steep grassy bank and there in front of us was the splendour of the Humber Suspension Bridge. 

It was a mass of activity on the eve of the formal opening ceremony by Queen Elizabeth II which was to take place on 17^th July 1981. A grand civic event it was to be. 

After all, the structure was the longest single span suspension bridge in the world , a major feat of technical and civil engineering and deserving of accolade and acclaim. 

Work had begun way back in 1972 with the North Tower completed some two years later on the hard chalk bed rock of the Humber Bank. The need to establish the South Tower in a caisson to counter the shifting mud of the river meant it was a further couple of years before the task of spinning the cables to support the box road sections could begin. 

The sections, prefabricated on shore and then floated into position took from the autumn of 1979 until the following summer to be lifted and fixed to allow the road surface to be laid. 

Although the visit of HM The Queen was to be the highlight of the £90 million project the bridge was actually useable by traffic in June 1981 as a test period. The infrastructure features of the visitor car park and Toll Booths were well established and from the former we had started our stunt. 

Only one of us, all still at school, had a driving licence and use of a car at that time and so Dave, his real name, being that person was the natural choice to take centre stage in what we had planned. 

It should also be said that Dave was the only person with access to a formal dinner suit or tuxedo and although this was his fathers it was a reasonable fit. 

In a bid to tidy up for the ceremony the concourse in front of the north tower booths was littered with building materials and stray vehicles of contractors and the Bridge Board but this provided good cover for us. We were also out of the line of vision from the futuristic Control Room Building which was an advantage against detection. 

Like a well oiled machine we all knew our roles. Two of us attached the stringy ends of multi coloured cotton bunting to respective sides of one of the booth lanes and Dave, with his Mother’s best dress making scissors, made a ceremonial incision accompanied by a short speech along the lines of “God Bless the Bridge and all who cross over her”. I was not sure then as now whether a bridge is of the feminine gender. 

The fourth member of our clique took a few photographs as a permanent record of the event. 

Dave does the deed

We must have looked very dodgy and furtive but at no time were we approached or challenged by anyone of authority. This accentuated our feeling of elation and success although in truth we may just have been one of a succession of students with the same prank idea and that the Bridge Staff,  tired of being distracted ahead of the Royal Visit,  just turned a blind eye to our adolescent behaviour. 

The whole thing took just a few minutes but (sadly) forms one of the most satisfying moments of my otherwise very conventional and boring teenage years. 

As far as I know the official ceremony went off well but then again not surprising as our dress rehearsal will have ironed out any potential difficulties that the Queen may have experienced on her and the Bridge’s big day.