Tilbury Floods

I was six years old at the time and the night that the sea wall was breached I had been to a pantomime with my parents.  When we arrived home and got off the coach at the bottom of Sherfield Road, we lived the second house in along Argent Street, there was water running in the gutters, which my father thought was strange.  We went to bed and were woken by a police tannoy advising that the Thames had breached through the sea wall and was flooding the area, so my parents started moving things upstairs.  In the morning it was like a river in Argent Street with water everywhere and there were a pair of house on Kilverts Field that were completely marooned.  We were lucky in that we had several steps up to our front door but others in the road were not so lucky and the water got in through their front doors.  One of our neighbours was cycling home from finishing his shift in the docks and he saw the water come through the sea wall as there was a full moon that night and it made him cycle faster to get home safely.  My family and I were very lucky and with all the flooding there is in the West country at the moment, I really feel for them.

Janet de Vries