Rainfall leaves Canvey Island devastated by floods

Fire crews have dealt with around 500 calls as a result of yesterday's severe weather, with most coming from flood hit Canvey Island. Essex Fire and Rescue Service had seven pumping appliances focused on the south east corner of the Island where the flooding was most severe, along with six duty officers, its Urban Search and Rescue team, water rescue specialists and a high volume pump. One month's worth of rainfall hit the area in the space of a few hours.

Assistant Chief Fire Officer Paul Hill said: "The first calls came in at around 3pm yesterday afternoon and it wasn't until 3.30am this morning that we were able to scale back to normal service on Canvey. "During that time we dealt with floods, structures struck by lightning and a couple of structure collapses. "Our approach to get through such an unprecedented level of calls was to deal with all life risk as priority and then we sent officers and appliances with lists of addresses to make sure there was no life risk at those calls where none had been reported just to make sure that residents were safe.

A picture of the flooding on #CanveyIsland earlier. Thoughts with all affected. pic.twitter.com/V6XbMeWQvM

— NPAS_Boreham (@NPAS_Boreham) July 21, 2014

Other areas hit by floods included Wickford, Waltham Abbey and Rayleigh, though flood related incidents came in from right across the County. Mr Hill said his crews were unable to pump out properties because there was nowhere to dispose of the water. He added: "But we are comfortable that we did everything we could to make sure people were and remained safe. "This morning, it appears the flood water has receded quite a lot and there has been no more rainfall. We do anticipate with the daylight hours another raft of calls but if that happens we are ready to send resources back onto the Island to deal with them."