After the flood
The ceremony was to be at St Patrick’s Church in Kilbrittan on June 26 this year followed by a reception for 66 people at the Munster Arms Hotel in Bandon. The couple were delighted.
However just two weeks later, their planned venue was under five feet of water as Bandon town suffered its worst flooding in 200 years on November 19.
The hotel hasn’t opened for business since and its 64 staff have all been let go.
Its nightclub, the Hub, re-opened at Easter but the main body of the hotel remains a building site at first-fix stage. The Keohane wedding is due to take place in a matter of weeks.
Siobhán and Mark aren’t ruffled though: the laid-back couple say that owner, Don O’Sullivan, has assured them that everything will be fine.
“There’s no point in worrying. Don has said it will be done and so we are confident it will be done. The work is proceeding to plan,” says Mark.
For the town of Bandon, the re-opening of the Munster Arms Hotel, a landmark in the area, is a real psychological high point.
The town was left on its knees when, in places, up to nine feet of water gushed into the town after the river burst its banks last November.
Already hurting from the recession, and particularly the collapse of the construction sector, this was like kicking a man when he’s down.
The last time I visited Bandon to see how the reconstruction work was progressing there was a sense that the western side of the town was hurtling ahead, while Oliver Plunkett Street seemed to be stuck in something of a quagmire. Much has changed since.
Maeve Sweetnam is a National College of Art and Design (NCAD) graduate who has been running her La Modeliste fabric shop on Oliver Plunkett Street for the past 17 years. After almost five months of renovations, her shop reopened at its original premises recently. However, you can still see faint evidence of the water damage inflicted upon the walls – even though they were all re-plastered.
Maeve had no choice but to re-plaster as fur started appearing on the walls 10 days after the flooding.
“It’s the smell that was left that I will never forget. It stayed for weeks afterwards – you couldn’t wash it away. It was the smell of sewage and it was horrific. No matter what you did, it was still there. At night, I could still smell it at home in bed.
“The other day a little girl came in and I heard her whisper ‘This place smells lovely, Mum’. I was delighted. Only then did I really believe that the smell was really gone: out of the mouth of babes, you have to believe that. I had been terrified all along about it. We do a lot of bridal fabric. Can you imagine a bride at the altar and her husband suddenly gets a smell like that?”
In spite of the dramatic pictures of last year’s flooding, outsiders rarely understand how terrifying such an ordeal is.
At 10am on November 19, Maeve’s brother rang her and warned that the river’s water levels were dangerously high and it looked like a serious flood was on its way. He said she should move stock from the ground floor shop.
“We started to lift rolls of fabric up the stairs but the rolls are very heavy and 4.5 feet long. We weren’t fast enough and not everything was moved up,” she said.
By 12pm, Maeve’s brother was in the shop, shutting off the utilities and gathering as much stock as he could in one go. He sent Maeve off to get sandbags. The town hall was mayhem at that point as officials pointed business and homeowners to a grain shovel, sacks and the big pile of sand.
“It was like Torc Waterfall once the water started coming in the walls of my shop. It just started to pour through the walls,” she said.
Maeve used to run a dressmaking service from La Modeliste and all the photographs of “her brides” were locked securely in the top drawer of a filing cabinet. The much-loved snaps are water damaged and she doesn’t think she’ll be able to salvage them. “You would always think that something would be safe in the top drawer of a filing cabinet.”
Maeve says she contracted “just one lung infection and a chest infection” in the aftermath of the flooding but many more are suffering much greater health problems.
Along with La Modeliste’s return to pre-flood trading, two more shops on Oliver Plunkett Street are now being refurbished – Fifth Avenue and the former Moon Lighting premises. The owner of local restaurant, Italistro has also bought a shop up the town and intends to run the restaurant and takeaway from there.
The Oliver Plunkett Inn was back in business for Christmas last year, when owner and Fianna Fáil town councillor, Seán O’Donnabhain described business as dire, due to the triple whammy of flooding, Arctic weather and the recession.
“Things have definitely picked up since. Now that the nightclub has re-opened, I can see a difference in business on a Saturday night and the Bandon Show went well,” he says.
Bandon Co-Marketing Group also launched a business card over the Bank Holiday Weekend, which at a cost of €5, gives discounts in up to 75 shops and businesses.
It can also buy a “free will” and a free GP check-up at some participating solicitors’ and GPs’ premises. It is hoped this initiative will encourage people to shop in the west Cork town.
IN THE aftermath of the flooding, Seán O’Donnabhain also decided to help establish the town’s first civil defence unit.
He said the haphazard response to the rising water levels last November can never happen again.
Thirty-five volunteers, aged 16-63, have been recruited to the Bandon unit and have just started training in first aid, how to fill and distribute sandbags, search and rescue operations, water pumping procedures during flooding, and how to complete sea rescues. The volunteers include three 16-year-old girls and a retired army sergeant.
Mr O’Donnabhain and other townspeople are not happy, however, about the county engineer’s recent refusal to dredge the River Bandon.
Instead, a river clean-up is being funded by Cork County Council, the Riverview Shopping Centre and Lidl.
“At a recent town council meeting, the town manager told us that the engineers won’t dredge because they believe it doesn’t work on rivers. They believe that a thorough clean-up of the river is sufficient. Dredging was done in the 1970s and 1980s and it worked then. We strongly believe that the river must be dredged again so that we can stop the same flooding happening next winter,” he said.
According to Cork County Council, dredging “isn’t an option” in the area as it would “kill off the angling industry”.
“We are going to sensitively clean the river in June after trout and salmon spawning is complete. We don’t want to end up with a lifeless desert instead of a thriving angling river. We’ll remove silt and gravel and clean the eyes of the bridge so that water can flow through them and that will make a notable difference,” said Cork County Council engineer Noel O’Keeffe.
Meetings have been held with the South West Fisheries Board on the matter. Cork County Council are also developing an electronic early warning system in conjunction with UCC’s Professor of Engineering, Ger Kiely. This system will ensure that an alarm will sound four to six hours before any real water damage can be done.
Mr O’Donnabhain has also taken issue with the town council’s decision to only clean from between Bandon weir and the bridge in the centre of the town. He maintains the river should be dredged all the way to Kimacsimon as that never flooded.
He believes that it never flooded due to “build-up down river that stopped the flow of water”.
So while this alleged build-up may have saved the people of Kilmacsimon from a similar fate to Bandon, it’s an ill wind that doesn’t blow some good.
Kevin Bowens took over his family’s near 50-year-old drapery business from his father three years ago. Kevin, in his 30s, had harboured plans to renovate and extend the men’s and womenswear shop – but not for another six years at least. But, then the floods came and on a November evening, he found himself and his staff in the pitch dark, chest-deep in water, using flashlamps so they could grab stock from hangers.
“I weighed it up seriously. I could have just re-fitted the shop like it was before the flood but I would have had to rip all of that out again in a few years when I did the refurbishment. I was trying to weigh up having the security of good trade when I re-opened versus availing of the cheaper costs of getting building done during a recession. In the end, it made sense just to go for it,” he said.
The new Bowens shop design can be viewed on YouTube and is more like a high-end Dublin department store than a typical family drapery business that you’d stumble across in west Cork. When it re-opens later this summer, the shopfloor will have increased in size by 1,000 square feet to 5,000 square feet.
In the meantime, Kevin has been running a sale shop further up the street. Due to the presence of three stairs in his original shop and willing staff, he saved 90% of his stock from the flood, selling it off at a 50%-70% discount in the months afterwards.
KEVIN, like many others in the town, is getting increasingly worried about what he sees as “the lack of flood relief action by the council”.
“The town council hasn’t done a thing to prevent this happening again. Just look at this town – our drainage is third-world. Everything goes through the one drain and then all the sand from the sandbags went into that particular drain too and blocked it up making things even worse. You have to question how SuperValu and Lidl were ever allowed build on that site. It was known locally as ‘the bogs’ for years. That says it all really,” he said.
“The bottom line is that we have to get the flood relief work started as soon as possible again.”
County engineer Noel O’Keeffe says he understands these fears but everything is “running according to plan”. A team of environmental engineers will be picked by the end of the summer and they should have a preliminary flood relief project designed within three to four months. The tender for construction of the flood relief project will be advertised next summer, with work expected to start late next year.
Kevin Bowens doesn’t think this good enough. “That was a 24-hour flood. What if we have a 36-hour flood? Back in February, there was another 24-hour flood and I couldn’t sleep a wink. On New’s Years Eve too, we had to move stock as we thought the flooding was happening all over again. A lot of people are very worried about the upcoming winter,” he said.
Noel O’Keeffe says Cork County Council and Bandon Town Council can’t go any faster. “We are governed by the laws of the land. We have to rigidly adhere to a public tendering process,” he says.
“We must also remember that this was a one-in-200-year flood.”
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