1960, Year Of The Floods.

Those wioth long memories may well remember when our part of Devon achieved regular national headlines due to repeated disasterous floods. In the autumn of 1960 a series of major storms combined with poor drainage and flood defences wreaked havoc on the Exe and Culm valley's and the St Thomas area of Exeter became famous on national television for pictures of people being rescued from their houses by amphibious vehicles and rowing boats.

Luckily of course, Silverton lies well above the flood plain and did not suffer flooding itself. There was however major disruption tom transport links in the area on a number of occasions particularly for those of us attending the newly opened Broadclyst County Secondary School. We became used to being sent home at short notice due to the rising river culm threatening to block the road between Ellerhayes and the Silverton paper mill. The flooding crisis reached its peak in late october when a major twenty four hour rainstorm led to the Ellerhayes road being blocked and our school bus being diverted back to Silverton via the back roads through Poltimore and Stoke Canon. Anyone who knows the area will be only too aware of the likely comsequences of that trip as it soon became clear that we were heading into even more serious flooding. The outcome was that we spent about an hour and a half trapped on a bridge with the water still rising while a tractor had to be found to tow the older school bus in front of us out of the water where it had broken down. I then remember us proceeding very slowly through Stoke Canon village where the water had risen well up the Tiverton road beyond the Post Office.

Following the floods major drainage and flood prevention work stopped floods recuring on the same scale again although flooding still happens from time to time. Now with climate change and the increasing frequency of major storms one has to ask if the floods of 1960 may have just been a portent of things yet to come.