'No sooner had I set foot in my living room when I found myself splashing around' - West Cork residents braced for further floods

Rosscarbery neighbours Michael O'Brien and Noel O'Sullivan whose houses were flooded last weekend. There are fears of further flooding over the coming days. Picture: Neil Michael.

The last thing 89-year-old Michael O’Brien expected to find in his living room was what greeted him at around 2am last Wednesday morning.

Swimming about on his only recently-laid wooden floor were eels and trout.

“I got the shock of my life,” Michael, whose wife Mary died seven months ago, said, speaking at the sandbagged entrance to his Rosscarbery home.

“I was woken at around 2am with the constant sound of rain and I looked out my window and could see a stream across the road spilling out over its walled embankment.

“So I ran downstairs but no sooner had I set foot in my living room when I found myself splashing around in over a foot of water.

“And I looked down and I could see small eels and small trout swimming around.”

His neighbour Noel O’Sullivan, 69, said: “We laugh about it now but we shudder when we think about what happened.”

He had been enjoying a quiet night in with two relatives at the end of what had been a gorgeous west Cork evening.

They all turned in around 1.45am but they were woken by a phone call from Michael next door.

The former forestry worker said: “You better come down and take a look.”

Noel grabbed some clothes and ran down the stairs only to - like Michael - end up diving feet first into a sudden pool of water.

Rosscarbery neighbours Michael O'Brien and Noel O'Sullivan whose houses were flooded last weekend. There are fears of further flooding over the coming days. Picture: Neil Michael.

The two men, who have been neighbours for more than 17 years immediately set about trying to stop the deluge of water flooding into both their houses.

But with water coming from all three routes into a junction a few metres up from their homes, they were fighting a losing battle.

“Added to everything was the thunder and the lightning and the lashing rain,” Noel recalled.

“It just never seemed to stop.”

Help arrived very quickly from both local gardaí and Cork County Council officials.

“They were very good,” Noel said.

“Before the gardaí arrived, we had people speeding past our houses, which are on the Rosscarbery to Skibbereen Road.

“The cars and jeeps going past would send sprays of water over our houses, and with a load of stones too.

“At one point we thought they were going to end up smashing our windows.”

Local gardaí not only sealed off the road, but also helped unload sandbags for Michael and Noel and other neighbours.

It would be another five hours before they had got rid of most of the water.

They were helped by a small army of neighbours and other residents from the town who turned up with mops and buckets and helped clear theirs and other people's homes of water.

But if Wednesday’s deluge wasn’t bad enough, it was repeated again in the early hours of Friday morning.

NEWS 18/8/2020 Pictured at Rosscarbery Co Cork was Patrick O’Donovan T.D., Minister of State with responsibility for the Office of Public getting a tour of the flooded communities by Ezra McManamon of the OPW and Tim Lucey CEO Cork County Council. Picture: Denis Boyle

Cork city teacher Seamus Hayes, whose rented home was flooded, said: “After the first flood, I had to stay somewhere else with friends because of the damage and stink from Wednesday morning’s flood.

“But I then when the rain started up again I went down to my rented home and it was flooding all over again.

“I tried to do what I could but it was no use and in the end I had to leave.

“Later that morning I had to clean it out yet again.”

Seamus, Michael and Noel were among hundreds of people affected by flash floods across parts of Kerry, Cork and Limerick.

But with bad weather forecast, more could be on the way.

Noel is philosophical.

“There is little more than we can do than make sure we have enough sandbags and just hope for the best,” he said.