Well, it had to happen I guess. One of the constant themes of this blog and the local political debate has been homes getting flooded. Through the course of that often acrimonious debate over how much should be spent, where things should be built and so on I've learnt things about the local area - such as the fact that Hammersmith has more basement flats than almost anywhere else in London - and that a lot of them are directly connected to the trunk sewer that carries sewage and rainwater from almost all of NW London down to the Thames underneath us.
And one of the problems with that arrangement is that the sewer cannot cope when it rains hard. And rain it did last night. The BBC is reporting here major flooding in W6 which I imagine has spread all the way up the Askew Road because thats where the sewer pipe goes.
There will be the usual recriminations after all of this, but for the time being my heart goes out to those who in the middle of last night found their houses and flats inundated with raw sewage and rainwater in equal measure. I've met some of them at public meetings like this - and they were at the end of their collective tethers then, so I can't beging to imagine how they're feeling now.
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