‘I’m still trembling. My house is destroyed’

COUNCILLOR Dominic Ryan went out into his garden at about 5.45pm to watch the water rising outside his Glenbrook Terrace home.

He knew the rain was falling heavily but he did a double-take when he suddenly saw a neighbour’s wooden boat being flung from a wave onto the roadside. The wave was three feet high and had come out of nowhere.

Inside her bungalow home on The Glen Hill, 65-year-old Ann King was watching The Weakest Link on Wednesday night. Suddenly her phone rang: it was a neighbour who urged her to look outside as “The Glen Hill was flooding fast”. Up to this, Ann had been oblivious to the rising water levels which had now reached five or six inches in height.

Her 31-year-old son Brian yelled “The car, the car” and ran out to move his recently purchased 2008 model when he saw the wave approaching.

“He rushed straight back inside. He could see five or six cars had been lifted up and were coming towards him. Rocks were tumbling down the hill at speed. He could have been killed if it was seconds later. Anybody could have been crushed to death there,” said a visibly shaken Ann King.

In total, eight cars, many of them luxury models, were lifted up by the wall of water before crashing into one another at the bottom of the hill. A 20-foot dead tree was also thrown across the road outside Ann King’s bungalow.

Her home, where she has lived for 43 years, is destroyed. She and her husband John had to escape through a window and the pensioner spent half an hour on a garden wall waiting for emergency services to collect her. “I was terrified. I’ve never seen anything like it. I’m still trembling. My house is destroyed,” she said yesterday.

Peter Leahy, who also lives on Glenbrook Terrace, spent all night Wednesday and Thursday morning trying to clean up the hill. The cars were piled up like a nightmare motorway crash, surrounded by mud, stones and boulders.

“From what we can see, a wall in the field up above the road, which was acting as a dam, appears to have collapsed and water had been building up behind it. When this water was released, it was too much for the storm drain.”

“Initially there was up to six inches of rain and then the dam burst and it became a three-foot wall of water.”

He estimates that 100 tonnes of water came rolling down the hill.

“We’ve had problems with water before but nothing like this. It happened all at once... The force of the water was incredible.

“When the surge came, the cars were lifted on to a bed of water. It was so fast and so dramatic that it felt like you were in a 3-D movie,” he said.

Cllr Dominic Ryan is livid.

An independent councillor, he has raised the need for flood relief measures at numerous Passage West town council meetings.

Every time he was told in no unclear terms, that there was no money for “non urgent” work.