Rain and lightning ends hot spell

George Smith12 April 2012

The heatwave was brought to a dramatic end as violent thunderstorms swept the country, with lightning strikes and flash floods up to 12 inches deep causing chaos in the South-East.

Fire crews in London, Cambridgeshire and Essex were besieged by calls from stranded motorists and people whose homes were flooded or struck by falling trees or lightning.

A spokeswoman for the London Fire Brigade, whose crews dealt with more than 120 calls overnight, said: "This was one of the busiest nights we have had in a long time because of the suddenness and severity of the storms.

"The worst hit areas were probably in Hornchurch and Romford, where there was major flooding. In some streets we had to help drivers whose cars were stranded in up to 12 inches of water.

"Fortunately, we don't know of anyone who has been injured, but there has probably been many thousands of pounds' worth of damage done to private property."

Firefighters in Cambridgeshire and Essex, which were hammered by torrential rain, answered a similar number of emergency calls. In Milton-Keynes, some homes were set ablaze and others flooded when freak electricity storms swept the city.

Buckinghamshire's fire and rescue crews were stretched to the limit as firefighters attended more than 50 reports of flooding in the city and surrounding villages.

At the height of the storm, which lasted five hours and ended just before midnight, reinforcements had to be called in from neighbouring Bedfordshire - with 25 fire appliances and nine officers needed.

The brigade responded to more than 200 of the 500 calls for help it received. One strike left a 10ft hole in the roof of bank manager David Adams's £300,000 home in Annes Grove, Great Linford.

Mr Adams said: "I was sitting down with my wife and son watching the Commonwealth Games in the lounge when there was a huge crash and rubble started pouring down the chimney and the fireplace."

In Scotland, there was travel chaos as almost all major rail services came to a halt in widespread flooding. Roads were also blocked, affecting tens of thousands of people.

Homes in many parts were flooded and fire services in the Shettleston area of Glasgow had to rescue dozens of families by boat.

More than 200 hotel guests and staff were evacuated from a hotel in the Trossachs area of Stirlingshire after a power failure during heavy storms.

At the Commonwealth Games in Manchester, athletes competed in torrential rain and, in Doncaster, hundreds of homes had to be evacuated when a brass foundry was hit by lightning.

Radio 1 DJ John Peel was kept off the air by a power cut at his Suffolk home.

He said: "I was in such a rage. There was nothing I could do in my studio and the only music I could listen to was on my daughter's battery-powered CD player."

A spokesman for the Met Office's weather centre said the risk of flooding and thunder would continue today as a band of heavy rain made its way towards the South-East from France.

He said: "There is certainly no sign that the kind of weather we had last weekend is set to return. It will be cloudy and wet for the rest of the week. Temperatures will rise to about 21C in London today, making it feel very sticky and humid with all this rain."`

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