Thousands of Britons Flee Deluged Homes

Worst Flooding in Decades Is Challenge for Brown

LONDON, July 23 -- Britain's worst flooding in decades left tens of thousands of families without water or electricity Monday night and forced thousands from their homes, including some dramatically rescued from rising waters by helicopters and boats.

Weekend storms that dropped a month's worth of rain in a few hours, as well as an extraordinarily wet June and July, caused the banks of two major rivers, the Avon and Severn, to overflow Monday. The water level on the western part of the Thames River was also rising alarmingly and in some places rivers were recorded as 20 feet higher than normal. The Association of British Insurers estimated that the damage caused by this summer's floods could exceed $4 billion.

The misery brought by the rising water, as well as growing complaints about inadequate flood defense and drainage systems, handed a major political challenge to Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who took over from Tony Blair last month.

Brown on Monday toured Gloucester, in western England, one of the areas hardest hit, and pledged new funds to repair the damage and take steps to prevent similar emergencies in the future. "It is pretty clear that some of the 19th-century structures and infrastructure and where they were sited is something we will have to review,'' he said.

Environment Secretary Hilary Benn told the House of Commons that the crisis was "far from over" and further flooding was "very likely."

With rising water threatening to shut down a water treatment plant in Gloucestershire, authorities said more than 400,000 people could lose their fresh water supply Monday evening. As of 7 p.m., 70,000 homes were already without water, a Gloucester police spokesman said.

"I have never seen such intense large-scale storms for such a prolonged period," said Paul Hardaker, head of the Royal Meteorological Society. He said more rain fell in June in certain parts of the United Kingdom than at any time since 1914, the start of modern record-keeping for rainfall.

Adrian Westwood, a spokesman for the Environmental Agency, said water levels in some places were higher than in the devastating floods of 1947, widely regarded as the most severe in modern history. He said floodwaters "covered a huge geographical area."

Severe flood warnings were issued Monday night for large parts of central and western England, including Oxfordshire and Bedfordshire.

John O'Brian, a schoolteacher in Evesham, a town near Stratford-upon-Avon in west-central England, had to sleep in his car outside a pub Friday night until the waters receded from the road and he could drive home. "I saw a mobile home come right down the river and crash into the bridge," O'Brian said in a phone interview. "It's a deluge."

The Royal Air Force was called in to rescue more than 100 people in a rare peacetime operation, and the navy was working Monday night to keep rising water from shutting down electrical stations. There were reports of prisoners being moved from flooded cells and swans paddling down deluged roads.

Ian Cluckie, a professor of hydrology and water management at the University of Bristol, said the exceptional rainfall in June led in some parts of England to flooding seen only "once every 200 years." Temporary floodwalls that could have kept some towns drier were not erected in time to hold the waters back, he said.

"Our summers can be quite wet, but not like this," Cluckie said. Scientists have predicted far more flooding in the future in Britain because of climate change, but "it's far too early to connect it to global warming," Cluckie said.