Jean Powell, 95, was woken by neighbours hammering on her door and taken to safety when a river burst its banks and swamped Monmouth. She never went home again, and died in September.
She spent the months that followed being looked after at a Wetherspoons pub. Friend and neighbour Wyn Smith said staff were “brilliant with Jean”, taking her food and caring for her. “We never thought she’d be there that long,” Smith said.
“Jean used to say, when am I going home?” Smith said. “All she wanted to do was come back home and we couldn’t fulfil that.”.
Her death is expected to be felt sharply when the first displaced residents return to Chippenham Court in the coming weeks, after a £1 million refurbishment.
Some have stayed with family. Others are in rented homes, an Airbnb or a care home.
She said she was woken by the coastguard and told she had five minutes to get her family out of their end-of-terrace cottage as floodwater surged towards it. She broke down recalling it.
The Frosts returned the next day without their boys. More than a foot of water had entered the house. “We didn’t bring the boys home for a good while because we didn’t want them seeing everything that they’d treasured had been destroyed,” Emily said.
An official Section 19 report said flood warnings — the level at which action is required because properties are in danger — were issued for all of Monmouth hours before the water arrived. The severe flood warning for the rest of the town went out at 03:31 on the Saturday, more than two hours after defences were breached and after shops and homes had already flooded.
Of the one in seven properties in Wales classed as at risk of flooding, the agency said fewer than a third of those eligible for phone or email warnings were signed up. Environmental bodies estimate about 275,000 properties in Wales are at risk, with another 400,000 in Scotland. In England, about 6.3 million properties — around 11.3 million people — are in flood-risk areas.
The Met Office estimates that, at current levels of global warming, record-breaking wet winters have shifted from once-in-80-year events to once-in-20-year events.