Second day of storms brings flood chaos: Hospitals and homes evacuated and roads closed after torrential rainfall
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Your support makes all the difference.FLASH floods and thunderstorms hit parts of Britain for the second day yesterday, with some areas having more rain during 24 hours than in June last year.
Worst hit was Llandudno in north Wales, where 500 people were evacuated as the strongest downpour in living memory swept away cars and caravans, leaving motorists stranded and flooding hospital wards.
The London Weather Centre said a severe weather warning remained in force last night, although the worst of the wet weather was over. During the 24 hours to yesterday morning, many parts of the country had more rain than in a whole month. Aberporth in Dyfed and Dawlish in Devon were the wettest places, with 2.53in and 2.47in of rainfall respectively. Average rainfall for the whole of last June was 1.81in.
In Llandudno, streets were under several feet of water. At least 1,000 properties were damaged and patients at the town's general hospital had to be evacuated to higher wards when a 3ft torrent flowed through the building.
At Conwy, elderly patients at a hospital were moved from their beds as water from a burst culvert flowed through wards. Scores of families in the town spent the night in a school after their homes were flooded.
Several caravans and cars at Cardigan Bay Leisure Park, west Wales, were engulfed when a tributary of the River Teifi burst its banks, causing a landslide. Two occupants of a caravan were winched to safety by an RAF helicopter.
Wyn Roberts, Minister of State at the Welsh Office, briefed Downing Street on what he called 'a crisis', adding that the Government was 'ready to give any help it can'. In Ongar, Harlow and North Weald in Essex, roads and homes were flooded in the early hours. Fifteen miles of the M11 was closed to traffic for a short time but police reopened it for the morning rush hour. Parts of the A414 near Ongar remained impassable early yesterday and some people evacuated during the night were not able to return to their homes.
A 22-year-old man from Epping, Essex, swam to help the occupants of two cars stranded beneath a motorway bridge at Thornwood in eight feet of water.
There were also reports of flooding in Kent, Cambridgeshire, Hertfordshire, Co Antrim and Co Down in Northern Ireland, and in Helston, Cornwall, where lightning strikes blacked out 5,000 homes.
(Photograph omitted)
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