Floods of 2007: '˜Everything was ready - and then we got flooded'

But that’s what Adele Salter and husband Graham faced when their home flooded on Goldcrest Close on Bransholme on June 25 2007.

House-proud Adele, 41, had just had a brand-new kitchen put in.

“We were getting married on July 28 and everything was prepared, then it was just as if the heavens opened and it didn’t seem to stop. We tried to get stuff upstairs but around 3pm it started seeping in from under the skirting boards, then it was coming from each side and met in the middle. I just sat and cried.

“I’ll never forget that day. Everything was brand new and it was devastating to put it all in the tip.”

Rather than cancelling they decided to go ahead, with Adele getting ready for the big day in a caravan in the front yard. They were back in the house just before Christmas, after stripping everything back to bare brick and starting again.

She admits to still being nervous every time there is heavy rain and thinks there will probably be another flood in future: “No money is going to prevent the rain falling.”

On Bristol Road, West Hull, Yvonne Priestley, a 65-year-old grandmother strokes her West Highland terrier Barney as she recalls the day every house in the street flooded.

“Opposite they were bailing out with buckets, wheelie bins were floating in my yard. I didn’t think it had come in but a few months later it started smelling and I had to move out for six weeks.”

The council put in a shallow scrape in the land in the centre of the tear-dropped shaped street to take some of the water. But Mrs Priestley was disappointed that after intense rainfall in early June her back garden was once again flooded. “They have tried to stop it, but I don’t think they have succeeded,” she said, adding: “I don’t worry, I can swim.”