We started this blog on the following Monday and your response was wonderful. Thank you for all the supportive comments during the emergency.

We will no longer be posting to this blog and will be leaving it as an archive of those few days in the Summer of 2007 when Gloucestershire become the focus of the world’s attention.

Over the weekend after the first flooding there was more rain and the River Severn spread to claim a vast area of land. The RAF mounted their biggest ever peacetime rescue, the flood waters overwhelmed the Mythe water treatment plant which supplied mains water to 350,000 people and, on the edge of Gloucester, a battle to save our electricity supply was being fought around the clock. We amended our corporate homepage (www.cheltenham.gov.uk), adding links to the Severn Trent website as everyone waited for news of water supplies.

On Monday morning, the mains water supplies across the town were running dry as the network drained and some of us had lost power at home as supplies were cut as a precaution. Our emergency planning team was in full swing, occupying a suite of meeting rooms down the corridor. There was a strange, very focussed atmosphere about the place.

It was obvious to us that the events unfolding were going to outpace the ability of our aging corporate website to adapt; the web team decided to create a blog. There was a constant stream of information and we needed to make it public as fast as we could. We also needed to be able to do this from any location, independent of our office power supply if need be. Of course, no power would mean no internet, making our efforts fall silent, but the power cuts might not be total. In any case we had a story to tell to whoever was listening. The blog would have to be hosted externally, be easy to use and almost immediate to setup. Cost then didn’t matter, but our choice was free, which felt good. We chose WordPress. For several months it has formed the backbone of our corporate intranet, our chief executive’s blog and even our staff directory. WordPress.com provides the same experience in hosted form. We chose a username and got started.

The flood blog was linked from our corporate homepage and we started adding content. By 3pm we had created the back story and by 5pm the blog had attracted the interest of BBC Radio Five Live.

From the start we adopted an informal style. Perhaps it was the freedom from a corporate template, or maybe our personal contact with the emergency, but the blog had a voice that was far removed from our corporate press releases. We wanted to show who we were rather than be an anonymous narrator. This communication style may prove to be one of the single most important changes that grew out of the flood blog.

We appealed internally for photographs and had a great response. Most of our images on the blog are hosted at flickr.com the photo sharing website. Uploaded images were tagged and descriptions added that linked back to the blog. The blog received a great many referrals via flickr as the interest in what was happening spread around the world.

We opened up an account on YouTube.com to host video footage of the distribution of bottled water. The purpose was twofold, principally we wanted to instil public confidence in our work, but we also wanted to acknowledge the extraordinary hours put in by volunteers staffing these distribution points. After that we were given more video clips to publish as staff around the town rose to the occasion and became reporters for us.

Both flickr and YouTube helped us present our content quickly and improve the transparency of how we were coordinating efforts. They told our story in a different way to a slightly different audience. The content on both sites was linked back to our blog. Within flickr we set up a group and invited members to add images, we started collecting pictures of Cheltenham taken by the people who live here. It was obvious that there were many Cheltenham folk pointing cameras around and documenting their lives from their own perspective; we simply tapped into the network.

There were six main bloggers feeding the site. It was very addictive and we would easily find ourselves monitoring it from the early hours to late in the evening. Early on we made the decision to enable comments on our posts. We wanted a conversation, and although we didn’t quite know what to expect any doubts were stripped away as our public warmed to the opportunity. Our flood devastated leisure centre became the single most talked about event. We learnt direct from our customers how the leisure centre had become a big part of their lives; its loss was way more than simply financial. All comments were moderated, but aside from insurance promotions, everything was published. We even let through Ernest Eagle, the sandbag salesman from Pennsylvania. In the seriousness of it all there was still time for humour.

WordPress is an amazing application. It represents everything that is good about the internet: collaboration, freedom, creativity and personal expression. One great advantage of the hosted version is web statistics, we knew exactly how many page views we had and where our referrals were coming from. In the first four days we had over 20,000 page views, which I think took us a little by surprise. WordPress hosts over 1.2 million blogs and on several occasions our blog was highlighted on their homepage. Interest in our innovation grew. A live interview on BBC Radio Gloucestershire, where we featured as website of the week was followed by enquiries from the emergency planning college. Our application of web 2.0 tools in crisis situation was being talked about in the blogosphere . There were some great quotes, this one appeared in a comment against an article on buzzmachine.com and it sticks in our minds:
“For once a lumbering, unwieldy organisation reacts in an agile, inclusive way”

Thank you to Pete Riley who created the blog and to everyone that helped to make it a such a success.

The rest of our leisure facilities face a long haul back to normal, but a good opportunity to make improvements along the way. Everyone will remember that photo of the flooded entrance, now a hive of building activity.

However, a number of schools, youth centres, children’s centres and other facilities will still be dealing with the impact of last month’s flooding.

St David’s primary school in Moreton-in-Marsh suffered extensive damage and it is estimated that repairs will cost £1.9m. Nevertheless, the diocese and the county council have been working throughout the holidays to ensure that there will be minimal disruption to pupils by installing temporary buildings at the school. The school will reopen only two days later than planned, on Thursday 6th September.

Councillor Joan Nash, Gloucestershire cabinet member for schools, said:

Just a two day delay in reopening St David’s. Who would have thought that at the height of the floods?

All the other schools that were affected will be opening on time. This success is a tribute, to staff, governors, parents, volunteers and contractors, who, with help and advice from the county council, have worked extremely hard to ensure that pupils do not lose any time at school because of the floods.

Both youth offending service offices in Gloucester are operating normally and arrangements are being made to provide a reduced youth service at Moreton and Tewkesbury youth centres.

Councillor Paul McLain, Gloucestershire cabinet member for young people, said:

The young people’s teams are doing a cracking job. I’m really chuffed that the youth service are already up and running in Moreton and Tewkesbury.

It’s good news that Gloucester’s youth offending services are back to full speed. If we want to turn around the lives of young offenders, then we need to be working from a strong and settled base.

The county council has also been issuing schools with information on practical and emotional support for children and their families affected by the flooding. Issues include dealing with the trauma of being flooded and/or displaced, help with school transport and uniform costs, assessment of extra needs and access to social care services. Lots of useful information is on the county council web pages at www.gloucestershire.gov.uk/floodrecovery

The total flooding repair bill for Gloucestershire children and young people’s services is £2.7m.

Introducing Mr Sylvanus Bowser…

Mr Sylvanus Bowser was an American from Indiana who invented the ‘self measuring gasoline storage pump’ launched in 1905. It consisted of a 50 gallon metal storage tank, housed in a wooden cabinet, which was set up in front of a store. The petrol was then dispensed into the car through a flexible hose, driven by a manual suction pump.

He went up to set up his own company, S.F. Bowser & Company, which expanded to deal with other types of commercial liquid. Mr Bowser was so famous that he even had a street named after him in his hometown – Bowser Avenue.

Eventually bowser became a generic term for any type of self propelled liquid tanker dispensing fluids. Here in the UK we use the term to refer to those wheeled water tankers we all grew to know and love during the recent flooding emergency.

Ou customers had to evacuate leisure@cheltenham on Friday 20 July as flood water began pouring from the nearby lake into the centre. Fire services had to close off the immediate area because of the threat of chemical explosion as gas tanks. At its highest, the torrent of water reached levels of five feet across the leisure centre’s ground floor. After a 24-hour operation to pump out water, fire crews made the building safe for council staff to begin assessing the damage.

Sonia Phillips, our assistant director for health and wellbeing said:

Everywhere was coated in a thick layer of silt, with computers, furniture and office equipment strewn across ground floor offices. All the sprung wooden floors on the site, including the sports hall and squash courts, were bowed and distorted into a permanent wave, the childrens creche was washed away and the pools were full of dark, muddy water.

Loss adjustors from Zurich Insurance who arrived on the scene the following day described ‘catastrophic damage’ and said the sports centre was one of the worst-hit facilities they had seen in the region.

Sonia Phillips is focusing on the future:

Leisure@cheltenham attracts an annual footfall of around 650,000 customers so setting up temporary sports and leisure facilities – and doing it quickly – is a huge challenge. At the same time, we are overseeing a multi-million pound refurbishment programme to bring the leisure centre back into operation. Our new temporary building is now being fitted out with thirty fitness stations, full shower and changing facilities and disability access, and we hope to be welcoming back customers at the end of September. We are also talking to other local organisations to see what more we can do for our customers.

Councillor Anne Regan, cabinet member for safer and stronger communities said:

I would like to thank all those who have expressed their support to the centre during recent weeks and give my assurance that we are doing everything we can to minimise the period of disruption that the closure has caused. leisure@cheltenham serves more than 111,000 residents so I am pleased that we will shortly have facilities for people to use.

Jim Schiro, chief executive of Zurich Global, saw the damage first-hand when he visited leisure@cheltenham earlier this month to meet Cheltenham Borough Council’s chief executive Andrew North and assistant director Sonia Phillips.

If you have moved house because of the recent flooding and your children need to change school, or you’ve moved and need help getting to your existing school, then Gloucestershire County Council can help.

Contact the school admissions team on 01452 425407/8 as soon as possible so that we can ensure your child is able to go back to school in September. If you already get special travel arrangements call the transport entitlement team on 01452 425390.

However, Rose says it was all a matter of degree as she did not have any sewage in the house like some of her neighbours! Rose had been on holiday, but went back to work as expected the following Monday wearing her wellies to look after vulnerable people and remained at her post for several days before the impact of her own personal disaster got the better of her.

Gloucestershire County Council Carers continued to work throughout the emergency often overcoming the worst of the floods to reach some of the county’s most vulnerable residents.

On a day-to-day basis, they carry out their jobs without fuss and away from the glare of publicity yet never was their dedication more needed.

Remember our how to help page if you think you can help someone, and please visit the Gloucestershire flood relief fund website if you can make a donation.