Steve Winfield, from the village of Sandiacre in Derbyshire, was woken up by his neighbour banging on his door on Friday morning. His back garden was submerged in water.
“At that point, it was probably about 2ft of water,” he tells Nosheen Iqbal. “He moved his cars out of the way of the flood water, but then realised the water was getting into his house. He moved as quickly as he could to move precious family memorabilia upstairs.
“Within half an hour of starting to do that, the downstairs was completely flooded and it was almost up to my knees.”
Steve lost thousands of pounds worth of possessions, but he counts himself as one of the lucky ones.
“I’m safe, this is just material goods, but some people have had it a lot worse than I have.”
At least seven people have died as a result of the flooding and poor road conditions caused by Storm Babet. Torrents of rain and wind battered parts of Scotland and the Midlands, leaving emergency services under pressure to rescue people.
“There was a warning but I think people were unprepared for the scale,” the Guardian’s Midlands correspondent Jessica Murray tells Nosheen.
She visits Chesterfield to speak to people affected by the floods, including Stephanie Winnard, Lorna Squires and Anne Squires.
We also hear from Prof Trevor Hoey, a professor of River Science at Brunel University London and the director of the Centre for Flood Risk and Resilience, about how we can improve our response to flooding events.
Photograph: Andy Buchanan/AFP/Getty Images
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