Flood heroes

I am the manager at Little Blossoms nursery, and although I had not gone away on holiday, I was actually on a weeks leave to do some decorating. I had noticed through the morning that it had been raining non-stop, but I hadn't needed to venture out of the house.

I was first alerted to a potential problem when my deputy rang at 1.10pm to say that parents were arriving to collect their children and saying that nursery was becoming an Island, with many routes to it already becoming impassable.

We decided that the children needed to be evacuated and it was agreed that the deputy would start contacting parents to collect the children, and I would join her at nursery to assist with the evacuation.

I soon realised the seriousness of the situation when my usual route to nursery was already impassable. In taking a second route, I managed to drive through a rapidly rising flood and get closer to nursery - only to find another flood much to deep to drive through in my car. I knew I had to get to the nursery, so phoned John Izod for help, who luckily had access to a company 4x4. He dropped everything and came to my rescue! He managed to drive through two major floods and I arrived at nursery unscathed.

A flood-ruined teddy bear.

Over the course of two hours, we managed to evacuate many of the children and staff, but by 3pm it was obvious we were in major trouble and I called in further help from Richard Myers, who is part of Mercia Inshore Search and Rescue and based in Upton. He also dropped everything and arrived to help in one of their Land Rovers. At this point, all roads to the nursery were impassable to anything that wasn't a 4x4.

At this point, very distressed parents began ringing the nursery saying that they were stranded in various locations around the area and were just unable to make it any further. It was at this point we knew the children and staff we had with us were going to be here for the night. We had enough food for everyone and children's bedding wasn't a problem, but we had nothing suitable for the adults.

Richard immediately began a rescue operation to retrieve a mum stranded close by, with the idea that rather than her spend the night in her car by the side of the road, we'd try and get her to us as well, so she could spend the night in the warm with her daughter. The journey would usually have taken 10 minutes, but in fact took an hour and a half! People were just abandoning their cars by the side of the road and attempting to walk to their destinations. Richard actually rescued two other people en-route, who had abandoned their cars and brought them back to the local area.

Richard managed to bring 'mum' to the nursery and she was happily reunited with her little one. He immediately set off again to repeat the process and successfully returned at 5.30pm for a second time. It was decided by all concerned at this point that it was too dangerous to go out again, and we began the painful process of contacting parents who were going to be separated from their little ones overnight.

Both Richard and John stayed in regular contact with us through the night and at 6am Saturday morning, John began driving around the area to see which routes were now safe to enable us to finish our evacuation. It was agreed by us that Richard and his colleagues, who were inundated with calls for help, now had far more urgent issues to deal with and we agreed that we could go it alone from this point with the promise to call if we were stuck.

John arrived at nursery at 7am with road updates and we began contacting parents with information on how best they could reach the nursery. By 11am, the evacuation was complete and all of the children had been reunited with their parents.

Both Richard and John played a huge part in the evacuation of Little Blossoms and we will never be able to thank them enough. That is why the staff, children and parents of Little Blossoms think they are Upton's local Flood Heroes!